Found: A Matt Royal Mystery (36 page)

We weren’t sure if the house had an alarm system, but Jock had some sort of electronic gadget that he said he could use to disarm one if necessary. In the event, we didn’t have to use it. The house wasn’t even locked. We walked carefully through the front door and stopped, listening for any sound. We heard loud snoring coming from a hallway that ran off the living room. We moved that way and found ourselves standing in front of an open door of a bedroom. The snoring was coming from a large lump under a
blanket. Jock went quietly through the other rooms while I waited outside McAllister’s bedroom.

Jock returned. We were alone in the house. He nodded at me and we went to either side of the bed. McAllister was lying on his back. The smell of old booze emanated from the sleeping man’s mouth with every snore. Jock poked the shotgun under McAllister’s chin and I grabbed a handful of his hair, lifted his head, and shoved the hood over his face. He was coming awake like a disturbed rhinoceros. Jock poked harder with the muzzle of the shotgun and said, “Calm down or I’ll blow your head off.” McAllister got the message and lay still.

“Who are you?” McAllister asked.

“Not important,” Jock said. “Get out of bed. There are two of us, and if you make one false move, they’ll be picking parts of you out of the furniture for the next week. Understand?”

“Yes,” said McAllister and slowly began to get out of bed. He was naked and said, “I gotta pee.”

“Where’s the bathroom?” Jock asked.

McAllister said. “Through the door.”

“Go ahead. I’ve got a twelve-gauge pointing at your back. If you make a wrong move, you’re dead. I better not see your hands move above your waist.”

“I can’t see to pee with this hood covering my face.”

“Just pretend it’s dark,” said Jock,

McAllister murmured his understanding and felt his way toward the bathroom, bumping briefly into a chest of drawers near the bathroom door. When he’d finished, Jock led him into the living room and sat him in the chair. He used flex ties to bind McAllister’s legs and arms to the chair. Jock then opened the satchel he carried and pulled out a small blowtorch. He used a lighter to activate it. It lit up with a whooshing sound of escaping gas. He held it near McAllister’s right ankle, not close enough to do any damage, but close enough for McAllister to feel the heat.

“Do you know what this is?” asked Jock.

“Blowtorch?” asked McAllister.

“Right. I’m going to ask you some questions. If you refuse to answer or lie to me, I’m going to burn your dick off. Understand?”

“Yes.” McAllister’s voice was shaking. I think he was just coming to the realization that he was in big trouble. “Are you going to kill me?”

“Depends,” said Jock.

“On what?” asked McAllister.

“On how much you cooperate.”

“Are you from the competition?”

Jock turned off the blowtorch. “You might say that. Do you have a safe in the house?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“In the bedroom closet. Under the floor. You have to pull up the trapdoor under my shoes.”

“What’s the combination?”

McAllister gave it to him. Jock looked at me, and I went into the bedroom, found the trapdoor, and opened the safe. There was a stack of currency wrapped with a rubber band. Mostly hundred dollar bills. Several thousand dollars’ worth. There was also what looked like a book bag. I opened it and found a loose-leaf notebook full of what appeared to be copied documents. They were all typed in English. I opened the book and glanced at the first page. The heading said, simply, “U-166.” I left the money and took the book bag back to the living room. Showed the first page to Jock. He nodded.

“Okay, McAllister,” he said. “Tell me about U-166.”

“Shit.”

“I know some of it,” Jock said. “You’d better not lie to me.”

“Not a problem. It turns out the whole deal was worthless. What do you want to know?”

“Everything. From the get-go.”

“At first, this was a deal that a guy named Porter King had set up. He was looking for investors. He’d found a sunken German sub up near the panhandle.”

“Where?” asked Jock.

“I don’t know. Somewhere south of St. George Island.”

“How did he find a sub?”

“He was in the business of surveying pipe lines for oil rigs. His company
would figure out the best route to get crude oil from the platforms drilling in the Gulf to the refineries. His people came across the U-166 in about three hundred feet of water.”

“Weren’t they required to notify the government of the find?”

“They did,” said McAllister, “but not before exploring it. They found the safe in the captain’s cabin. It’d been torn loose during the explosions that sunk it. It was just lying there. Two of his divers hooked it up to a float device and raised it. They opened the safe and found nothing but the ship’s log and some documents stored in a waterproof metal container with a name etched into the top.”

“What were the documents about?”

“King didn’t know. They were in some sort of numerical code. He hired a cryptologist to figure it out and the guy told him it was impossible. He said the code was a simple one based on page, line, and word numbers in some book. Without the book, it was indecipherable.”

“Why would King be looking for investors for something like that?”

“It got a bit complicated. He told the divers that there was nothing of value in the safe, but that they had committed a major felony by not leaving the safe with the wreck. A lot of people in his company knew about the wreck, but only King and the two divers knew that the safe had been found. King told the divers they had to keep quiet about the safe, or they would go to prison for a long time.”

“And the divers bought that?” asked Jock.

“They did for a while. But then one of them started making waves. He wanted some of whatever King got out of it. King had them both killed.”

“When did all this happen?”

“King found the wreck about two years ago. The murders happened about six months later,” McAllister said.

“Okay, then why did King want investors?”

“He thought the documents must be worth something if they were in a virtually unbreakable code. He hired a researcher in Europe to see what he could find out about the sub. Apparently, those records aren’t that difficult to find. It turns out that the sub was on a routine patrol in the Gulf of Mexico when it was lost. The Germans didn’t know if it was sunk in the Gulf or somewhere in the Atlantic. They just knew it was gone.

“It turns out that as far as the U.S. Government knows, we only sank one U-boat in the Gulf during the entire war. The last log entry on the U-166 was August first, 1942, so it was reasonable that the sinking took place about that time. It just so happens that the U.S. Coast Guard has always maintained that the only sub sunk in the Gulf was the result of an attack by one of its planes on the morning of August second, 1942.”

“How did King determine that the sub was U-166?” Jock asked.

“U-166 was embossed on the cover of the logbook.”

“So, what did the researchers in Europe find that made the documents so valuable?”

“The sub was carrying a passenger, an officer named Paulus von Reicheldorf. It turns out that he was some sort of spy.”

“How do you know that?”

“The researchers found a document in the folder for U-166 ordering Reicheldorf aboard. It would have been very unusual to simply have a passenger along on a war patrol. That sent the researchers to the files of the German intelligence agency, the Abwehr. One of the major documents in that trove is the diary of the head guy, an admiral named Canaris. Looking back from the date the U-166 left Lorient, France, for the Gulf, they found a reference indicating that Canaris had sent Reicheldorf on the patrol to take some documents to German spies in San Antonio, Texas. Canaris knew Reicheldorf’s family, apparently, and was worrying about whether he’d sent his friend’s son to his death. King thought that the mission, and therefore the documents, must have been very valuable for Canaris to send this particular officer on such a dangerous mission.”

“So King needed the money for the research,” Jock said.

“Right.”

“I thought he’d made a bundle when he sold his business.”

“Not really. The company was deep in debt and most of the money from the sale went to pay that off. King ended up with some money, but he was quickly running through it.”

“How did you get hooked up with him?”

“Through my lawyer,” McAllister said.

“Jim Fredrickson.”

“Yes.” There was a hint of surprise in McAllister’s voice. I could
almost hear the wheels turning in his simian brain. Jock must know a lot more than McAllister thought he did.

“Tell me about that,” said Jock.

“King was living on Longboat Key and played golf at the same club that Jim and I did. Somehow, he and Jim got friendly and one day King mentioned to Jim that he needed some backing to hire the researchers and find out more about what he’d found. Jim brought him to me.”

“You’re a cop. Why would Jim think you could fund such a thing?”

“I inherited some money.”

Jock reached down and picked up the blowtorch. He made a production of lighting it, getting the sound of the gas escaping and igniting. “Whoa,” said McAllister. “I’m cooperating.”

“Inherited money?” Jock said. “You think I’m an idiot? Talk to me about the drugs and the house in Avon Park and the armory you have over there and what’s in the safe. Tell me about the parties with the women.”

“Jesus,” said McAllister.

Jock moved the blowtorch closer to McAllister’s crotch. Close enough that McAllister could feel the heat. “No,” he screamed. “Honest to God, I’ll tell you everything.”

Jock moved the blowtorch back and said, “You lie to me again, and I’m going to light up your gonads. Do we understand each other?”

“Yes. Please.” McAllister was breathing hard, gulping for breath, sobbing. He was near panic and Jock had to calm him down.

“Look, Captain,” Jock said. “Burning your nuts off isn’t going to get me anywhere. So let’s make a deal. You tell me the truth, and I’ll let you keep your equipment.”

“Okay. God, yes. Okay.”

“Now, tell me why Jim Fredrickson came to you.”

“Jim and I were in business together. We were buying and selling drugs. We had established a network of street-level dealers and we were getting our product from some very bad people. We’d put a lot of money aside. We couldn’t figure out how to launder it, get it in our accounts without the feds finding out.

“Jim and his law partner, Wayne Evans, came up with a solution of
sorts. We’d invest in King’s deal, but it would show up on all the documents as an investment in a new oil-drilling venture. King was in the business, so that might pass muster if it was ever looked into. It wasn’t a lot of money, a couple hundred thousand, and Jim and I salted our accounts with low-level deposits over several months. Then we gave the money to King, and he got the information from Europe.”

“When did you get the answers from Europe?” Jock asked.

“A couple of months ago. Those guys took over a year to dig it up. But once we got the information, we felt that we were onto something big.”

“Why? The documents were indecipherable.”

“Maybe not. The man Admiral Canaris sent on the sub? He was some sort of hereditary count, and they found him in Berlin.”

“How?”

“Easy. He was some kind of big shot in the government. He was retired, but he wasn’t hard to find.”

“Is this the guy you killed a few weeks back?” asked Jock.

“Hey, I didn’t kill him. I never left the U.S. You can check it out.”

“But you killed Rodney Vernon up in New Jersey,” Jock said.

“If you know so much, why are you asking me?”

“Don’t get surly with me, McAllister, unless you want your wienie roasted.”

“Sorry,” McAllister said.

“What happened to Vernon?”

“That was King’s doing. He sent some men to talk to the guy in Berlin. They thought they could get him to give up the name of the book that was the key to the documents and maybe explain what was in them. He was a tough old bird, I guess, and didn’t give up anything. He said he didn’t know what the hell the men were talking about.”

“So,” Jock said, “the count wouldn’t talk, and King’s men killed him.”

“That’s the way I heard it.”

“Who did you hear it from?”

“Porter King,” McAllister said.

“What about Vernon in Jersey?”

“King said his men in Germany found some e-mails on the old man’s
computer. They were correspondence with the guy in Jersey. King thought Vernon might know something, maybe the name of the book that was the key to the code.”

“Why would King think that?”

“In one of the e-mails, the old man in Jersey said something about books and how they were the key to learning. King just thought that might be some kind of code the two old guys were using, maybe to let the count know that Vernon had the book. King was grasping at straws.”

“Canaris’s diary didn’t mention the name of the book that was the key?”

“No, and there was nothing else that the researchers found that would give him that information.”

“Why did you kill King?” Jock asked.

McAllister reacted as if he’d been hit by a rifle butt. “What?”

“Lie to me,” said Jock, “and I’ll barbeque your nuts.”

“Okay. Look, his girlfriend was talking to that bitch detective out on Longboat Key. I was afraid she might incriminate me. I had to take her out. Unfortunately, King was in the condo when I got there. I hadn’t expected that. I had to get rid of him, too.”

“He was the guy who was going to make you rich. Why kill him?”

“I’m already rich. King was going to be my vehicle to launder the money. That wasn’t going to happen. We’d hit a dead end with finding the key to the code. Wayne Evans had come up with another idea on how to move the money and we’d already done that, so we didn’t really need King. We just thought if he was able to figure out those German documents, we’d maybe make some real money.”

“What did you think were in the documents?” Jock asked.

“King thought they might identify a bank account with lots of spy money in it. Or maybe the names of people who were helping the spies. He said that there were a lot of prominent people who were sympathetic to the Nazis before we got into the war, and maybe some of them had continued to work for the Germans.”