Wyatt's Revenge: A Matt Royal Mystery (2 page)

“Matt,” Logan said after some time had passed, “you’ll be okay.”

And I knew he was right. Pretty soon, time would begin to erode the sharp angles of my grief, round it out, soften it, and I would tuck it away back in the corner of my mind where all the other dead soldiers live. Life would go on, but it wouldn’t be as sweet as when Wyatt was part of it. His leaving would tear a hole in the heart of our island community, one that would never be completely filled. Stories would be told in the island bars of a good man with a quirky sense of humor who took care of his friends, gave generously of his money, and sometimes drank too much Scotch. We would talk of him with affection and laugh at his antics, and soon the stories would grow larger than life. I would live and remember, and over time the grief would dissipate like the fog of an early morning.

My name is Matthew Royal. I’d been a trial lawyer for a long time, so long that the profession turned into a business without my noticing it. When I finally figured it out, that money had become more important than the client’s cause, I quit and moved to Longboat Key, Florida.

I live on an island that is a quarter-mile wide and ten miles long. It floats serenely off the southwest coast of Florida, south of Tampa Bay, about halfway down the peninsula. The key is separated from the mainland by Sarasota Bay, and you have to cross a bridge, drive across another island, and cross another bridge to find the real world. I liked it that way. It provided a sense of isolation.

I am also a trained killer. Or, at least, that’s what I had once been. When I was seventeen, I joined the army. I went through basic training, advanced infantry training, jump school, Infantry Officer Candidate School, Ranger School, and Special Forces training. By the age of nineteen, I was ready to lead men in combat and kill our nation’s enemies. I did some of that in Southeast Asia, and then I left it behind me. College and law school recivilized me, and I moved to Orlando to practice law. Over the years my wife tired of my lack of attention to her, divorced me, and moved to Atlanta. I stayed in Orlando until I realized that the law had lost its nobility, and I said to hell with it.

I challenge middle age every day, work to keep the golden years at bay, retain my boyish charm, and not lose sight of the fact that I am getting older. I’m not a gym rat, but I do work out. I run regularly on the beach and keep myself in reasonably good shape. I stand six feet tall and weigh the same 180 pounds I did when I got out of the army. I have a head full of dark hair, eyes that are brown and not my best feature, a nose that once experienced
a fistful of grief and is a little off-center. My dentist keeps my teeth in good shape and I’m told that I have a nice smile. I don’t think of myself as handsome, but I tend to grow on people.

I was young for retirement, but I had enough money to live modestly for the rest of my life. I found that I enjoyed fishing and drinking beer with my friends, jogging on the beach, and tumbling the occasional pretty girl. Not a bad life. And then some asshole slips in and puts out the lights of a good man who enjoyed the same things I did. I couldn’t let that pass.

Dawn on Wednesday morning. A cool breeze was blowing out of the north, ruffling the surface of the Gulf. The sun was suspended over the mainland, having just cleared the Earth’s curvature; hanging there like it had all the time in the world before it had to start its climb into the heavens.

My boat was anchored in Longboat Pass, just seaward of the bridge. The tide was going out, and the stern had wheeled around, now facing the open Gulf. Five other boats were rafted to mine, their anchors buried in the soft bottom, the tide straining their lines.

I put a CD into the stereo in the dash. The sound of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” drifted over the water. The twenty people in the rafted boats stood quietly facing astern, their heads bowed, some in tears.

As the last notes of the song faded away, I spoke in a voice loud enough to be heard on all the boats. “He was a good man, and I loved him.” That said it all.

I tipped the small metal urn over the stern, and the ashes of Laurence Wyatt drifted on the breeze, settled onto the surface of his beloved Gulf of Mexico, and floated seaward with the outgoing tide. I heard a sob from Sam Lastinger’s boat, rafted next to mine. Logan was standing there, tears coursing down his cheeks. He looked up at me, smiling sadly. “Let’s go home,” he said.

We spent the day mourning Wyatt in our way. On Longboat Key, that meant that we drank too much, told funny stories about the departed, and mused on the vagaries of life. We all wondered who would be the next to go. On our island, so filled with elderly people, death is a constant reality. We accept it, mourn our lost friends, and move on. It is only when one is
taken violently and without warning that we become the shocked survivors.

We’d seen Wyatt off according to the instructions he’d left with Donna. Cremation, ashes drifting on an ebbing tide, Dylan singing “Like a Rolling Stone,” and then revelry.

Wyatt’s friends, who managed the Hilton on the island, opened the upstairs bar for the mourners, a going away party that befitted a man the islanders loved. Wyatt enjoyed a party, loved the gathering of his friends, the laughter, the stories told again and again. Every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas, he would feed many of the snowbirds who were far from home and family. Twenty people or more would crowd into his condo for the festivities. They always left sated with food and good cheer. On several occasions, Wyatt had put together what he called memorial parties for friends who had died. He would have wanted the same, and the islanders were out in force to see him off.

Cracker Dix was there, dressed in his usual — cargo shorts, Hawaiian shirt, and flip-flops. He’s an expatriate Englishman who has lived on the island for years. He came over to me, sipping from a can of beer. “Can I talk to you for a moment?” he said, and beckoned me into a corner.

“Matt, do you know Leah, the deaf girl who cooks at the restaurant where I work?”

“Sure.”

“She reads lips, you know, and she saw something the other day that didn’t make any sense to her.”

“What?” I asked.

“She’d come out of the kitchen and was standing just inside the dining room when she saw a man say, ‘Wyatt’s a dead man.’ She didn’t think anything about it until the next day when she heard about his murder.”

I made a “come on” gesture with my hand. Cracker tended to drift off subject after too many beers.

“Leah said there were two men at a table eating dinner. One had his back to her, and the other one was facing her. That was all of the conversation she saw. She just didn’t think anything about it. She sees parts of conversations all the time.”

“Did she recognize the man?” I asked.

“No, but she got his name. After she heard about Wyatt, she went to the credit card receipts and got his name and credit card number. I wrote them down for you.”

I looked at the scrap of napkin he handed me. It had a name, Michael Rupert, and a long string of numbers. “Does this mean anything to you?” I asked.

“No,” said Cracker, “I never heard the name. The numbers are his credit card number.”

“Thanks, Cracker. Have you said anything about this to anybody else?”

“No. I figured you might want to deal with this yourself. I told Leah not to mention it to anybody either.”

Chief Bill Lester joined us late in the morning, coming to pay his respects, and bring me up to date on the investigation. “The autopsy results came in last night. No surprises. He was killed by the gunshot behind the ear. The crime scene investigators didn’t find the slug that killed him. It’s probably buried in the sand on the beach. Wyatt was sitting in his chair on the balcony when he was shot. They found the slug fired into the back of his neck under his chair. It had gone through his neck, taking out part of his chin, and then through his left thigh. The techs think Wyatt slumped forward when he was killed, and the second bullet was fired in a downward direction. It was pretty much spent by the time it went through his body twice, and it just bounced around on the floor.”

“What was it?”

“The bullet?”

I nodded.

“Forty-five caliber.”

“Can you match it to any other murders?”

“Not from around here. We’ll run it through the federal database, but I don’t have high hopes for that. The killer picked up his brass before he left, so we don’t have that to work with. If we see another slug from the same gun, we can match it, but that’s a very long shot.”

“What about time of death?

“The medical examiner thinks he’d been dead about two hours when Donna found him. Puts it at about seven.”

“There’re security cameras in the elevators,” I said. “Did you check them?”

“Yes. We think we’ve got a pretty good shot of the killer coming up the number two elevator at six fifty-five. Unfortunately, he had his head down, and he was wearing a ball cap. His face is completely shielded.”

“Anything else?”

“No sign of breaking and entering. Either Wyatt didn’t have his front door locked, or someone had a key. Nothing was missing from his condo except his laptop. No signs of struggle. No fingerprints; at least none that don’t belong to people who had a reason to be there, friends and visitors. We’re beginning to think it was a professional hit.”

“On Wyatt?” I said. “That makes no sense. Who’d want to kill Wyatt?”

“I don’t know, Matt. I’m just following the evidence.”

Debbie was where she always was on an early evening, behind the bar at Moore’s Stone Crab Restaurant on the north end of Longboat Key. She had been at the memorial, but left in mid-afternoon for work. She was a blonde forty-something refugee from Ohio winters and had been tending bar on the island for more than twenty years. Some years before, she had taken some computer courses and became a world-class hacker. Not many people knew that, and she liked it that way. However, she was a good friend, and I knew I could count on her to help. Particularly, since it would help solve Wyatt’s murder.

The bar was horseshoe shaped and the plate glass windows gave a twelve-mile view down the bay to the city of Sarasota. There were docks and piers fronting the restaurant, and they were often crowded with boats bringing customers for the generous portions of seafood offered by the establishment. I arrived just before five to an empty bar. Debbie pulled a cold Miller Lite from the cooler and put it on a coaster in front of me. I cocked my head in a questioning manner, and she said, “Okay Royal. I’ll get you a damn glass.”

She came back with a frosted glass. “Sorry I had to leave early today,” she said.

“The party was winding down. I don’t think anybody’s at the Hilton but Cracker, and he’s drinking at the outside bar.”

I hadn’t been in for a couple of weeks, and we talked quietly, catching up on the island gossip. Occasionally, a waitress came to the back service bar, and Debbie would excuse herself to fill the order. The TVs were all tuned to ESPN, and highlights of Sunday’s NFL games were being played and replayed.

“Deb,” I said, “do you think you could hack into a credit card company’s main server?”

“I can. The question is, will I?”

“If I asked nicely?”

“Okay. What do you need?”

I handed her a piece of paper with the credit card number and Michael Rupert’s name. “I think this guy may have had something to do with Wyatt’s death. Will you see what you can find out about him?”

“What’s his connection?”

“I don’t know. He may have been the trigger man.”

“Where’d you get his credit card number?”

“I can’t say, Deb. I promised absolute confidentiality to the person who gave it to me.”

“No problem, Matt. If I thought I couldn’t count on your discretion, I sure wouldn’t go around hacking computers for you.”

“You’re a sweetheart.”

“And Wyatt was my friend, too.”

A couple I didn’t know came into the bar and effusively greeted Debbie. It was the time of the year when the snowbirds were starting to return, and they would stop in to see old friends at the places they frequented while on the key. I waved at Deb and walked out into the gathering twilight.

I was on the dock in front of my condo just before noon the next day, washing my boat and sweating in the heat. My cell phone rang. It was Debbie.

“Matt, this guy is a ghost. That credit card is the only thing he has in his name. The bills are sent to a post office box in Fern Park, Florida, wherever the hell that is. The only other Michael Ruperts I found are way too old or still just boys. This has to be your guy, but there’s nothing else about him anywhere.”

“I’m not surprised. It was a long shot, but at least we know where the bills go. He’s probably using an alias and has a fake driver’s license and the credit card to use when he’s traveling.”

“You want me to keep looking?”

“No, thanks. I’ll see what I can turn up with this information.”

She hung up, and I went back to the business of scrubbing the boat’s
hull. Who was Rupert? The fact that he didn’t seem to exist made me think that he might be a contract killer. But who would be interested enough in Wyatt’s death to pay someone to kill him? And who was the man at Cracker’s restaurant with Rupert the night before the murder? I’d have to find Rupert and backtrack to whoever ordered Wyatt killed.

Logan Hamilton was my friend. He and I had come to the island at about the same time, and we discovered a mutual enjoyment of the watering holes on the key and the people who frequented them. Logan had worked in the financial services industry, retired early, and was enjoying life in the sun. He was originally from a small town outside of Boston. He’d come to Florida as a college student, and then was a soldier in Vietnam, first as an infantryman, and after flight school, as a helicopter pilot. He traveled the world in his business, never really settling down and never marrying. He was a gentle and kind man who quietly supported every charitable endeavor in our little world.