Found: A Matt Royal Mystery (39 page)

I was too nervous to do much but pace the floor. Five minutes went by and my phone rang. J.D. “We’re coming to your house,” she said.

“We?”

“Jamison and I. You’re not going to believe what he has to tell us.”

J.D. walked through the door, followed by a tall, slender man who, while obviously elderly, didn’t look like he was in his nineties. She introduced Jock and me to Bud Jamison.

“Where’s Katie?” she asked.

“In her room,” I said. “She didn’t want to get in the way.”

“She’s a part of this,” J.D. said, and went to knock on Katie’s door.

When we were all seated in my living room, J.D. said, “I wanted you to hear what Mr. Jamison has to say. He told me some of it, but I haven’t heard all of it. I wanted to wait until we were together so he only has to go through it one time.”

Jamison said, “This is a long story that covers a lot of years. I’ll tell it all and answer any questions you have.”

“Why did you disappear?” I asked.

“Some very bad men were looking for me.”

“Then why resurface now?” I asked.

“One of the men, Porter King, was killed last weekend. I thought about it for a few days and decided that I needed to talk to Detective Duncan about the other man that would want to do me harm. I wasn’t sure she wouldn’t turn me over to the bad guy, so I went through some machinations today to make sure she wasn’t bringing somebody with her.”

“But you’re here,” I said.

“I told Detective Duncan that the leader of a group of very bad people was a cop; Captain Doug McAllister. When she told me that he was dead and what he’d said about King, I thought I could tell her the rest of the story and come out of hiding.”

“Tell Katie who you are,” said J.D.

He turned to look at Katie. “Do you recognize me?” he asked.

“I’ve seen you somewhere, but for the life of me, I can’t remember where or when.”

“I once drove you to the bus station in Tampa.”

Surprise, or shock, or something suffused Katie’s face. “Of course,” she said. “You were in front of my house the night my husband was killed.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t understand,” Katie said.

“Let me show you something,” Jamison said. He pulled a small photograph from his shirt pocket. It was a duplicate of one I’d seen in his bedroom when Jock and I searched the place, the one of the skinny woman standing in the surf holding an infant.

Katie took the photograph and looked at it for a moment. “Okay?” she said, a question in her tone.

“That’s you and your biological mother,” Jamison said, “taken when you were five days old.”

This time the look on Katie’s face was one of skepticism. “I don’t understand,” she said.

“Your mother was dying of cancer when that picture was taken. Your father was the captain of a long-line fishing boat and was lost at sea a few months before your birth.”

“I don’t understand,” said Katie. “What happened to her?”

“She died a month after that picture was taken.”

“How did you get this picture?”

“I took it.”

“Who is the woman?”

“My daughter,” Jamison said.

Now Katie looked puzzled. She was quiet while she worked it out. “I’d like to hear the story,” she said.

Jamison smiled. “Your mom’s name was Melanie. Melanie Jamison. My wife died in childbirth, bringing Melanie into the world. I raised her by myself, with a lot of help from the people of Cortez. I left the sea and took work in the fish houses. Sometimes, I had to go back to sea for a few weeks to make enough money to keep us in food. When I had to leave, Ken Goodlow and his wife took Melanie in and took care of her.

“She grew up to be a wonderful young lady, smart and full of life. She graduated from high school and went up to Tampa to the University of South Florida. When she finished, she came home and took a job teaching at Manatee High School. She got married and within a year was pregnant with you.”

“What happened?” Katie asked. She was intent now, focused on Jamison, intrigued by the story, but perhaps still skeptical, not believing what Jamison was telling her.

“As I said, her husband, your father, was the captain of a long-line fishing boat that would be at sea for several weeks at a time. One day, the boat didn’t return. A bad storm had come up the Gulf from south of the Yucatán. There was no warning. It developed fast and moved north with tropical storm winds. We’re pretty sure your father’s boat was caught in the storm. There was no more radio contact and the Coast Guard couldn’t find any trace of the boat. A few months after the boat disappeared, when your mom was in the last stage of her pregnancy, some debris washed ashore down on Marco Island. They were able to identify it as coming from your father’s boat.”

“Tell me about the cancer,” Katie said.

“Your mom was pretty sick during the pregnancy, but it got worse, and the doctors did a lot of tests. They found the cancer, but it was too late. They told us that if your mom underwent chemo and radiation treatments, she had a slim chance of beating it. But, the treatments would kill you. She thought it would be better to save you than try to hang onto life. I have to tell you that I argued with her about the decision. I didn’t want to lose her.”

“But you did,” said Katie. “Lose her.”

“Yes.”

“Why not keep the baby?” Katie asked. I noticed that she didn’t refer to the little girl as “me,” just “the baby.” She still wasn’t convinced.

“I was in my fifties,” Jamison said, “and still working the boats some. I knew I couldn’t raise a child the way she should be. Melanie and I talked it over and decided to put you up for adoption.”

Katie smiled. “I think you have the wrong girl, Mr. Jamison,” she said. “I was left at a fire station in Orlando.”

“No,” said Jamison, “you weren’t. I contacted a lawyer I knew in Bradenton, and he arranged a private adoption. Melanie and I took you to his office right after that photo was made. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, other than burying my wife and daughter.”

“My adoptive father told me I was left at a fire station.”

“I can see your skepticism, but if you’ll think about it, you’ll see that I could have no motive whatsoever to make up such a story. A simple DNA test will confirm that I’m your grandfather.”

“Who was my birth father?”

“His name was Brian Fox. Melanie met him at the university. He’d been in the Coast Guard before starting college and when Melanie brought him to Cortez, he was able to get a job as a captain on one of the boats.”

“Are his parents still alive?” Katie asked.

“No. They probably died years ago. They lived in Michigan, and I don’t think Melanie ever met them. There had been some friction between Brian and his parents, and he never even told them about Melanie being pregnant. I was never in touch with them.”

“So,” said Katie, “my mother’s name was Melanie Jamison Fox.”

“Yes,” said Jamison. “But even that was a lie.”

“I don’t understand,” said Katie.

“My name is not Jamison.”

“What, then?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if what he was telling Katie was true, but I couldn’t see any reason for him to lie, either. The fact that he had been living under an assumed name might shed some light on the whole mess.

Jamison laughed. “It’s a long story,” he said, “but my real name is Paulus Graf von Reicheldorf.”

“Reicheldorf was killed in Germany a few weeks ago,” I said. “What the hell are you selling?”

“The dead man in Germany,” said Reicheldorf, “was my cousin, the son of my father’s younger brother.”

“You didn’t tell me about this,” J.D. said to the old man.

“Sorry, Detective,” Jamison or Reicheldorf said. “I didn’t think it important. I wanted to go to my grave as Bud Jamison.”

“Tell me about this cousin,” I said.

“My cousin was known by his middle name Ernst. In our family the firstborn sons carried the first name of Paulus, the name of the first graf in our line, but, except for the heir to the title, each son was called by his middle name. If for some reason one of the other sons succeeded to the title, he was thereafter called Paulus. When I was lost at sea in 1942, my cousin inherited the title.”

“You were lost at sea?” J.D. asked.

“Yes. In 1942.”

“What’s a graf?” asked Katie.

“It’s the German equivalent of a count,” said Reicheldorf.

“I thought you grew up in the Washington, D.C. area,” J.D. said.

“I did. My father was an officer in the German Navy during World War I and later, during the Weimar Republic, became a diplomat assigned to the German Embassy in Washington. We came to the U.S. when I was about four years old and stayed for ten years. When the Nazis took over the German government, my father resigned and we returned to Germany. I had gone to American schools and spoke English with an American accent.”

“What happened when you returned to Germany?” asked Katie.

“My family was ostracized from the government, but we had varied business interests that my father and his brother oversaw. We weren’t poor. I finished school and enrolled at Heidelberg University.”

“Ah,” I said. “Thus the dueling scar.”

He touched his left cheek and laughed. “Yes, the foolishness of youth. I guess we were proving our manhood, but we were headed into a war that would test that with much more severity than a game of fencing.”

“How in the world did you end up in Cortez?” I asked.

“After Naval Officers School and a tour of sea duty, I was assigned to the Abwehr, the German Intelligence Agency. My parents were killed in an air raid on Hamburg right after I joined the navy and one of my father’s old comrades from World War I had become the head of Abwehr.”

“Admiral Canaris,” I said.

“Yes. He felt that it was his job to shield me from the horrors of war. I disagreed. I hated the Nazis, but I thought it my duty to fight for Germany. We were an old civilization and tyrants had come and gone. I didn’t think Hitler would last more than a few years, certainly not the thousand-year reign he envisioned for the Nazi party.

“I talked the admiral into sending me on a mission which turned out to be a fatal one. I was ordered to act as a courier for some documents that were going to a German spy ring in San Antonio, Texas. I boarded a U-boat that would drop me off the coast near Galveston. As it turned out, we were sunk by an American plane near St. George Island up in the panhandle. I was the only survivor. I rowed a lifeboat ashore and gave myself up to a lighthouse keeper on St. George.”

“You walk with a limp,” said J.D. “Is that a souvenir of the U-boat sinking?”

Reicheldorf smiled ruefully. “No,” he said, “that was inflicted on me by some Nazis in a prisoner-of-war camp at Camp Blanding up in north Florida near Jacksonville. There were two groups of prisoners, those like me who had no use for the Nazis and those who were rabid about the cause. There was a big riot one evening, with the groups fighting each other. I got hit in the knee by some kind of heavy bar. It caused a lot of
damage, and the American doctors at the camp didn’t have the tools or knowledge to do much about fixing it.”

“How long were you in the POW camp?” J.D. asked.

“Only about three months. It became apparent that I was marked for death by the Nazis. An informer told one of the guards, an American military policeman, that I would be killed in another riot that was to take place soon. The MP came to me to discuss it. He spoke very little German and I had not revealed to anyone that I spoke English. Once I got the gist of what the MP was trying to tell me in German, I responded to him in English. He helped get me out of the camp. The records were a bit chaotic that early in the war, so I don’t think anyone ever really knew I had been there, much less that I was gone.”

“How did you survive with no identification and no money?” J.D. asked.

“The Abwehr had provided me with some very good forgeries, passport, driver’s license, birth certificate, all kind of documents to make me appear American.”

“You had them with you in the POW camp?” Jock asked.

“No. Before I turned myself in at the St. George lighthouse, I buried the documents. I went back and got them.”

“How did you get back to St. George?” J.D. asked.

“Hitchhiked. The MP had given me twenty dollars, which amounted to almost a month’s pay for him. It was enough to keep me going for a while. He’d also hidden some old clothes outside the camp’s wire, so once he got me out, I buried the prison uniform, put on the clothes, and started walking west. Nobody questioned me except one man in a small grocery store where I stopped to buy food. He was wondering why I wasn’t in the service. I showed him the scars on my knee and told him I’d crashed a motorcycle and wasn’t physically fit for the military.

“Once I retrieved my identity documents, I was home free. From that moment on, I was John Jamison, nicknamed Bud.”

“How did you find out about Cortez?” Katie asked.

“The MP who saved my life at Camp Blanding was born and raised in Cortez. His name was Ken Goodlow.”

The room was silent. I think we were starting to see the threads of two disparate mysteries come together. “Did anyone else in Cortez know who you really were?” I asked.

“Not at first. Ken knew, of course, but he was sent overseas right after he helped me escape. I got a job with old Captain Longstreet and fell in love with his daughter, Bess. Ken came home when the war was over and we decided that we’d keep the whole thing secret. The only other person who knew the story was Bess Longstreet, and I didn’t tell her until just before we were married. If she’d backed out of the wedding, I would have left Cortez.”

“You must have told Rodney Vernon,” J.D. said. “Otherwise, how would he have been in contact with your cousin in Germany?”

“After the war, the Allies restored some of my family’s business holdings. Ernst was running them and beginning his rise in the new political atmosphere. He’d spent the war years in Sweden and had become friendly with Willy Brandt, who after the war, became mayor of Berlin and then chancellor of Germany. After Melanie was born, I began to think about how I was cutting her off from a family that she might someday want to know. I decided to make contact with Ernst, but I didn’t want him to know my assumed name or where I was living. I was perfectly happy with my new life and didn’t want to go back to Germany. I was also afraid that I’d probably violated a bunch of American laws by coming into the country the way I had and living under a false identity. I didn’t want to be prosecuted and deported.