Wyatt's Revenge: A Matt Royal Mystery (7 page)

The wind shifted to the east, and the sound of music and laughter floated across the bay. Far out on the dark water, the brightly lit dinner cruise boat from the Seafood Shack was making its way north, headed back to the restaurant, full of sated diners enjoying their after-dinner drinks. It was a quiet night on the key, an autumn evening marked by good conversation with one of my two best friends.

We switched to good whiskey, Logan to Scotch and I to bourbon, sipping it neat, the evening winding down. Our lives were about to change drastically, but we didn’t know it, couldn’t have guessed it, and couldn’t have altered the course of events if we had known.

My morning ritual is not complicated, but I’m kind of obsessive about it. I get up, turn on the coffee maker, pick up the daily newspaper from near the front door, and then sit on my sunporch overlooking the bay. I sip my coffee, read my paper, and enjoy the sunrise. It was no different on Thursday, the week after Wyatt’s funeral.

My phone rang. I looked at my watch. Seven a.m. It was Wyatt’s ex-wife Donna, a lawyer in Orlando. She’d spent the night of Wyatt’s funeral in Logan’s guest room, and left for Orlando the next morning, telling me that she would be out of pocket for a few days. Said she was going off somewhere to grieve.

“Hope I’m not calling too early,” she said.

“Not at all, Counselor. How’re you doing?”

“I’m fine. I’ve been in Atlanta with some friends. Trying to come to grips with Wyatt’s death.”

“Is it working?”

“Better than I would have thought. But, that’s not why I’m calling. I just got into my office and in all the mail that’s piled up while I’ve been gone, there was a package from Wyatt.”

“What is it?”

“It’s a data CD with notes on a project he was working on. He put a handwritten memo in it telling me that it was his only copy and that I should take good care of it, because he’d erased the data on his hard drive.”

“What’s the project?” I said.

“What I could retrieve is pretty bizarre. There were several files, but they were all corrupted somehow, except one. I’d like you to look at it and see what you think.”

“Can you e-mail it to me?”

“It’s on its way,” she said, and hung up.

I finished my coffee and the newspaper, did the crossword puzzle, and took a shower. I put on clean clothes and fired up my computer. There was an e-mail from Donna with an attachment. I opened it and read the following:

Dick LaPlante
Rene LaPlante
Richard de Fresne
Professor Paul Sauer-UF
Klaus Blattner
ICRC
Organisation de ehemaligen SS-Angehörigen
CBS – Zurich
Alois Hudal
Ratlines
Genoa
Buenos Aires
Karlo Petranovic
Augustin Barrere
Klarsfeld, Beate & Serge
Vichy

I didn’t recognize anything on the list except the name Dick LaPlante. I’d read about him in the newspapers. He was the richest man in Florida, and lived in the largest house on Casey Key, a nearby island known for its wealthy people and large homes. He was middle aged and had been married three or four times to trophy wives. It seemed that when a wife reached her mid-thirties, he dumped her and acquired another younger version. All the exes lived in lavish homes in the Sarasota area and appeared regularly in the society pages of the local newspapers.

LaPlante owned citrus groves, cattle ranches, citrus processing plants, and a fleet of cargo ships based at the Port of Tampa. He supported various politicians and wielded a lot of power in both Tallahassee and Washington.

I called Gwen Mooney. She had been the society editor of our island
weekly newspaper for so many years that she knew every socially prominent person in Southwest Florida, and everything about them.

“Do you know Dick LaPlante?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“What can you tell me about him?”

“He’s an asshole.”

“That’s all?”

“That about sums it up.”

“Okay. Why do you think he’s an asshole?”

“He marries and discards wives like most of us do old socks. Never kept one long enough to have children. He’s got more money than God, and got it all from his old man. He always shows up at the charity events during season, but he gives a whole lot less than he should. He sucks up to politicians and gives them lots of money. I hear rumblings that if Senator McKinley is elected president, LaPlante will be offered a cabinet position. That’s enough to make me vote for the senator’s opponent, whoever that is. He’s a leech. If his father hadn’t hired good managers for the businesses, Dick would have run them into the ground by now.”

“What was his dad’s name?”

“His name is René. He’s still alive. Lives in one wing of that mansion Dick built down on Casey Key. He’s probably in his nineties now, but sharp as a tack. I interviewed him a couple of years ago.”

“So he’s the one who made all the money.”

“I’m not sure he made it. He’s of French-Canadian heritage, but was born in Vermont. His parents died when he was a boy, and he doesn’t like to talk about his childhood. His parents had a lot of real old money. They came from two of the richest families in Canada. Rene was an American Army officer in the Pacific during World War II, and he came to this area shortly after the war was over. Married a local girl and settled down. He had a lot of money and invested in lots of thing. He gave a bunch to Jewish causes.”

“Is he Jewish?”

“I guess. His wife’s father was a rabbi in Sarasota.”

“Why have I never heard of René?”

“He lived a quiet life. Didn’t seek any publicity. His wife died while
Dick was in college, and when Dick graduated, he came back to the area and took over the family business. Dick loves the limelight, but he’s an asshole.”

“You mentioned that. Is there any chance Dick will make it to the cabinet?”

“The election is still two years off, but I hear a lot about McKinley. He comes from a wealthy family that can probably finance a campaign out of their own pockets. Only child, never did much but run for Congress and then the Senate. Married, but no children. Still in his forties.”

I read her the other names on the list, but she didn’t know any of them. I thanked her for her help, and hung up.

I called Donna, catching her at her office. “Did any of the names on that list mean anything to you?” I asked.

“No. I recognized the name ‘Vichy’ but I don’t know if he meant the water or the town in France.”

“What about Professor Sauer? Do you know him?”

“No. I’d guess he was a colleague of Wyatt’s. Probably another history professor.”

“Okay. I wish we had the rest of the files. Any chance of recovering the data from the disc?”

“I’m taking it to an expert this afternoon, but I’m not optimistic. Usually, when that stuff is corrupted, it’s gone.”

“Stay in touch, Donna. Don’t be a stranger on Longboat.”

“Bye, Matt.”

I Googled Sauer, and found that he was a history professor at the University of Florida in Gainesville. I called the number of the history department, and a young-sounding woman answered. I identified myself and asked to speak to Professor Sauer.

“Ah, okay. May I say what this is in reference to?”

“It’s personal.”

“Hold, please.”

I listened to the tinny sound of Beethoven on the local PBS station. Then a man with a deep voice picked up and said, “This is Doctor Spencer King. I’m head of the department. May I help you?”

“I’m trying to get in touch with Professor Sauer.”

“Are you a friend of his?”

“Yes.” I lied, but what was this all about? You’d think I was trying to talk to the governor.

“I’m sorry to tell you that Dr. Sauer has passed away.”

“When?”

“A week ago Sunday.”

The same day that Wyatt died.

“What happened?” I asked.

“He was working late in his office here at the department, and somebody shot him dead.”

“A robbery?”

“The police don’t think so. The only thing taken was the hard drive from Dr. Sauer’s computer. Didn’t even take the monitor or keyboard. Just ripped the drive out of the CPU.”

“Did they catch the guy?”

“No, the police say they have no suspects.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. May I ask if Dr. Sauer concentrated on any particular historical era?”

“I thought you were a friend of his.”

“More of an acquaintance, really. We had a mutual friend. Dr. Laurence Wyatt.”

“Sure. Down at UCF. I heard he died.”

“Yes. I was calling to make sure that Dr. Sauer knew about Wyatt’s death.”

“ETO, W.W. two.” King said.

“What?”

“Sauer’s expertise was in the European Theater of Operations during World War II.”

“Did he have anything to do with the Nazis?”

“If you mean did he study them, the answer is yes. He’d made a subspecialty out of the study of particular Nazis, and what happened to them after the war.”

“Thank you for your time,” I said, and hung up.

Chardone would have had plenty of time to kill Wyatt and drive the
three hours to Gainesville, have a leisurely lunch, do a little coed watching, and kill Sauer. I thought I knew where Chardone got the extra ten grand I found in his apartment.

It was time to talk to Bill Lester. I called him at the police department and arranged to meet him for lunch at the Mar Vista, a restaurant clinging to the shore in the Village on the north end of the key. I asked Logan to join us. He was my sounding board, and I wanted him to hear as much as he could firsthand.

When I walked out of my condo, I was surprised at the coolness in the air. It wasn’t so much cool as it was dry. The humidity had finally abandoned us a week or two later than usual. I decided to ride my bicycle the two miles to the restaurant.

The amiable hostess directed me to a table under the trees near the water and handed me a menu. I told her whom I was waiting for, and she said she’d send them over as soon as they arrived. I watched a commercial fishing boat chug south on the Intracoastal, a plume of black smoke emitting from the exhaust pipe that ran up the side of the pilothouse. A small tug pushing a barge with a construction crane on its deck passed slowly, heading north. The sun was high, the air cool under the trees. A fall day in Southwest Florida is hard to beat.

Logan and Bill arrived and pulled up chairs. The waitress brought us iced tea. We chatted about the fishing, or lack thereof, the stone crabs that had just come into season, and gossiped a bit about our friends on the key. Bill told us that some benefactor had anonymously mailed the library twenty thousand dollars in cash. “Some of our people have more money than sense,” he said. “There’re a lot of sticky fingers between the mail box and the library.”

When we ran out of small talk, I said, “Bill, a University of Florida professor named Paul Sauer was killed on the same day as Wyatt; shot to
death in his office. He was a historian, and his name was on some papers Wyatt left. I’m wondering if there’s a connection. Can you check with Gainesville PD?”

“I got some interesting calls just this morning,” Lester said. “A New York City cop was shot to death over near Orlando last week. The Seminole County detectives working the case found a .45 in his apartment, and when they ran the ballistics through the national data bank, they found our entry and one from the murder at UF. It looks like the gun killed both Wyatt and the professor in Gainesville.”

“What was a New York cop doing with the murder weapon?” Logan asked.

“That’s very interesting. The dead guy’s name was Michael Rupert. There were credit card receipts in the apartment and a post office box in Rupert’s name. When the detectives checked with the credit card company, they found charges at a restaurant here on the key for the night before Wyatt’s murder, and another from a barbeque joint in Gainesville the day of the murder there. Then, somebody anonymously sends the lead detective a computer hard drive with pictures showing Rupert and the New York cop, a guy named Rudy Chardone, having sex with young children. The pictures were e-mailed back and forth from Rupert’s computer to Chardone’s in New York, but the funny thing is that the pictures of Chardone and Rupert were of the same person. NYPD confirmed that it was Chardone. Apparently, he wanted the pictures on both his computer at home and the one in Florida. The guy was a pervert, and the working theory is that he was moonlighting as a hit man.”

“So, you think he killed Wyatt?” I said.

“It looks that way.”

“Why? Does anybody have any ideas as to why?”

“Sorry, Matt. That seems to be a dead end.”

“Do they know who killed the hit man?”

“No,” said Lester, “but the cleaning lady told the detectives that a man had been asking about Rupert the day he was killed. Described the guy as nondescript, but he may have been a cop. He showed her a badge.”

I was not at all flattered by the description, but I liked the idea that Tammy couldn’t really identify me. “Why would a cop kill him?”

“Maybe because Chardone was a bad cop, or maybe his killer wasn’t a cop at all. Used a .38. You’ve got a .38, don’t you Matt?”

“Yep. A brand-new one.”

“I thought you’d had one for a number of years.”

“I did, but I lost it in that fracas down in the keys a couple of months ago. Was anything taken from Sauer’s office? Was it a robbery gone bad?”

“The only thing missing was the hard drive from his computer.”

“Just like at Wyatt’s.”

“Yeah.”

We finished our lunch, and the chief went back to work. Logan and I sat and enjoyed the weather and ordered a beer.

“I didn’t like that question about your .38,” said Logan.

“Neither did I. I’ve got to be very careful here. Bill Lester’s a good friend, but he’s also a cop. I hate being on the wrong side.”

Cracker Dix came over and asked if the information he’d given me turned out to be any good. I told him to have a seat.

“Cracker,” I said, “Logan knows what you did about the credit card information from that guy Rupert, and we both appreciate it. Unfortunately, it was a dead end. Either the deaf girl misunderstood Rupert or he was talking about some other Wyatt. He turned out to be an accountant from Jacksonville.”