Mortal Dilemma Read online

  “Careful. Your Southern roots are showing.”

  “Yeah, great-great-grandpa’s probably turning in his grave.”

  “What’s up?” Sammy was standing across the bar from us, a Miller Lite beer and a glass of Pinot Grigio in his hands. “Matt, you sure kicked that guy’s ass last night in Tiny’s.”

  “A little bit,” J.D. said. “If I hadn’t shown up, the guy would probably have taken Matt.”

  Sammy looked at me quizzically. I looked at J.D. and was sucked in by that smile. “What the lady said,” I said, grinning.

  “Right,” Sammy said. “You’re just trying to get lucky.”

  “Or,” J.D. said, “maybe he’s just being agreeable because he already got lucky.”

  “My gawd, man,” Sammy said in his best Scottish brogue. “Have you been having carnal knowledge of this lass?”

  I shrugged and gave him a knowing wink. “What’ve you been doing, Sam?”

  He laughed. “Same thing I usually do. Work, drink on Bridge Street, sleep to noon, have lunch with my girlfriend, get ready for work. It’s a full day.”

  “Which girlfriend?” J.D. asked.

  “Whichever one I wake up with.”

  “You’re a true gentleman,” she said. “Where do you usually have lunch?”

  “My place. I keep hot dogs on hand just in case.”

  J.D. made a face. “Ugh. Forget what I said about your being a gentleman.”

  “I was kidding, J.D. As you know, my tastes tend to run to the gourmet.”

  “Oh yeah. Sorry. I forgot who I was talking to for a minute. You’re more of a chicken-wing kind of guy.”

  “Right. You ready for some more wine?”

  The banter and conversation went on like that while we ate our dinner. Eric came over and asked about Jock. I told him Jock was doing better, and we laughed about how many of the Loft’s pizzas Jock could eat at one sitting.

  We greeted some of the snowbirds, listened to their stories about their summers, talked to our friends Tom and Nancy Stout, sang along with Eddie and his piano, and called it a night.

  “My place or yours?” I asked as we walked down the outside stairway.

  “Let’s spend tonight at my condo. There’s only one way into the place and there’s a very good dead bolt on that door. It might be safer if there’re really some bad guys looking for us.”

  And that’s what we did. All in all, it was a very pleasant evening on our island paradise.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3

  THE DRIVE UP I-4 was pleasant. Well, as pleasant as I-4 ever gets. We had a quick breakfast at the Longbeach Café and started our three-hour drive to Sanford, the seat of Seminole County and the home of the Seminole County sheriff’s office.

  We were getting close to Orlando when J.D.’s phone rang. She answered. “Hold on, David,” I heard her say into the phone. “Let me put you on the speaker. Matt’s here and I want him to hear what you have to say.”

  The three of us chatted for a minute or two and then Parrish said, “I’ve got lots of paper that I don’t understand. My people served the subpoena this morning on the bank that oversees the Fortson trust. We got a huge load of documents on a flash drive. I’ve looked at them but they make no sense to me. I can get one of our people with an accounting background to look at it, but that may take some time. They’re buried in a huge fraud case. What do you want me to do with them?”

  “It sounds like a lot of stuff,” J.D. said. “Can you email it to our department I.T. guy?”

  “I don’t know. Ours can probably figure it out. I’ll call you back if we can’t do it.”

  “I really appreciate this, David.” She gave him Reuben’s email address and hung up.

  “Maybe something good will come out of that,” she said. “I’ll call Reuben and have him forward the stuff to Ken Brown.”

  * * *

  Detective Glenn Howell was a blond man who stood a couple inches below six feet and spoke with a decided Georgia inflection. He was gracious in the Southern way and offered us a seat and coffee. We accepted both.

  “You sound like you’re from Georgia,” J.D. said.

  “I am. Originally. I was born and grew up in Fayette County, just south of Atlanta. I’ve been here since I graduated from college. You’re from up that way, too, I think.”

  “Born in Atlanta,” J.D. said. “My dad was an Atlanta cop for twenty-five years and when he retired, we moved to South Florida. I was about twelve at the time.”

  “It’s good to meet you both,” he said “Sims has told me so much about you, I feel like I know you.”

  “Sims lies, you know,” I said.

  “I know, but I didn’t think that was well known outside the confines of the great state of Georgia.”

  “It apparently slipped over the border,” I said. “Spread like wildfire.”

  “He only said good things about the two of you.”

  “He does still have some lucid moments,” I said.

  J.D. laughed. “You guys stop ragging on poor old Sims.”

  “Okay,” Howell said. “We’ve got a lead on the people who tried to take J.D. out. A salesman of some sort left his car at one of those privately owned remote parking lots near the Orlando airport last Wednesday. He used his car in his work and kept meticulous notes on the miles he drove for tax purposes. When he got back and picked up his car on Saturday he noticed that several hundred miles had been put on it since he left.”

  “The Camaro with the shotgun?” J.D. asked.

  “It fits the description you gave the Alachua sheriff. The owner of the car called the Orlando PD and a detective came out to see what was going on. The lot is set up so that when a car pulls into a gate, the driver takes a ticket from a dispenser and then is told what row to park on. He’s picked up by a shuttle bus and taken to the airport terminal. When he returns, the reverse happens. Nobody at the lot ever gets his keys. But there is a surveillance camera that keeps an eye on the entrance and exit. The detective reviewed the video and saw the car leave the lot within an hour or so of the owner leaving it. It was returned late Thursday afternoon.”

  “The time frame fits, but what made you think it was the same car?”

  “When the forensics people examined the car they didn’t find even one fingerprint in the obvious places. The interior had been completely wiped down. Except that there was one print found on the underside of the little lever on the left side of the driver’s seat that is used to adjust the seat. They got a hit on it. A young man named Xavier Duhns, who works for the parking company driving one of the shuttle buses. He lives in Seminole County, out near Altamonte Springs. Orlando PD asked us to pick him up. We got him last night and an Orlando detective is due here any minute to talk with him. I thought since you were coming anyway, you might want to sit in.”

  “I still don’t see the connection,” J.D. said. “The only thing in common with this car and the one with the people who were after me is the make and color. There must be millions of those cars on the road.”

  “The mileage fits,” Howell said. “That’s about it. But if the car had been driven to Gainesville and back, the distance is very close to the mileage on the car. It’s probably not your guy, and I wouldn’t have asked you to come all the way over here just to sit in on his interview, but since you were on your way, I figured why not.”

  “It won’t hurt to take a look at it,” J.D. said. “What can you tell me about Duhns?”

  “Not much. He’s twenty-two years old, has a record of several minor infractions, never enough to go away for. Always got short probations.”

  “No car theft in his background?”

  “None. But, and this is an interesting factoid, his older brother is serving a ten-year stretch in prison for car theft. I busted him about three years ago. He and a couple of buddies were stealing cars all over the county and shipping them to Miami, where they were put on boats and sent to the Caribbean and Central America. They were pret
ty professional.”

  “So maybe big brother taught Xavier how to boost cars,” J.D. said.

  “Probably.”

  “That isn’t that easy these days. Not with all the technology built into the cars.”

  Howell’s desk phone buzzed. He took the call, said “okay,” and hung up. “Detective Vargas from OPD is here.”

  * * *

  Xavier Duhns was sitting at a table in a bare interrogation room, his right arm cuffed and attached to an O-ring in the floor. A video camera in a corner pointed at Duhns, a little red light showing that it was recording. J.D., Glenn Howell, and I were standing in a small ante-room watching through a one-way mirror.

  Detective Vargas walked in and took a seat across from Duhns and introduced himself. Duhns nodded. “Do you know why you’re here?” the detective asked.

  “No.”

  “Car theft.”

  “You’ve got me mixed up with my brother.”

  “You think he stole a car on Wednesday?”

  “He’s in prison.”

  “Yeah. I heard. You’re not real smart, are you?”

  “Smart enough,” Duhns said.

  “Smart enough to get out of a beef for attempted murder of a police officer? I hope so, because that could put you in prison for life.”

  That got Duhns’ attention. “What’re you talking about?”

  “You’ve got one chance here, Xavier. Did you know that your employer had video cameras at the entrance and exit to the lot?”

  “No. So what?”

  “We saw you leave in a car that was parked there and we watched you bring it back on Thursday. We also watched you drive the shuttle bus that took the owner of that car to the airport on Wednesday.” Vargas was stretching the truth a little, since the angle of the cameras and the dark windows of the Camaro did not give us a clear picture of the driver.

  “So?”

  “We also found your fingerprints in the Camaro.”

  “You’re lying. That car was clean.” Duhns stopped, a look of consternation on his face. He might have just stepped in it.

  “Not completely clean, Xavier. You’re a big guy. Do you remember adjusting the seat?”

  “Maybe.”

  “We found your prints on the lever that controls the seat’s position.”

  “So?”

  “So we’ve got you on the car theft charge, Xavier. You’re going away for a few years, but you’ll still be young when you get out. On the other hand, that attempted murder charge will put you away forever.”

  Duhns leaned into the table, put his forearms on it, and grinned. “Good try, Detective. Okay, you got me on the car beef, but I never tried to kill no cop and you can’t prove I did.”

  Vargas leaned back in his chair, scratched behind his right ear, and sighed. That was the signal. J.D. opened the door and entered the room. “Hello, Mr. Duhns,” she said, her voice as pleasant as if she were greeting him at a lawn party. “How nice to see you again.”

  Duhns looked up at her, a puzzled look on his face. “Have we met?”

  “I’m surprised you don’t remember. I’m Detective J. D. Duncan. We met last Thursday up on I-75 at Paynes Prairie, just south of Gainesville. You were driving a beautiful black Camaro.”

  Duhns blanched, stuttered a bit, and finally got it out. “What do you mean?”

  J.D. leaned on the table, her palms planted flat on its surface, her face twisted into a grimace and inches from Duhns’. Her voice dropped a register, her words flat and clipped. “I mean when you drove that Camaro next to my car and some asshole pushed a shotgun out the window and tried to kill me.” J.D. was using a bit of profanity, words that almost never escaped her mouth. She was really stressed out about her near-death experience and more pissed off than I’d ever seen her.

  “You couldn’t possibly have seen who was driving,” Duhns said.

  “Whether I did or not isn’t relative to this conversation,” J.D. said, her voice like steel. “The question is, who do you think a jury will believe? You or me?”

  Duhns chewed on that for a moment, then turned to Vargas. “What do you want to know?”

  “How many were in the car with you when you took the shot at Detective Duncan?”

  “I didn’t take the shot.”

  “How many?”

  “Just me and Skeeter.”

  “Who’s Skeeter?”

  “That’s all I know. Never heard his last name.”

  “How do you know him?”

  “I don’t, really.”

  “You just picked up a guy with a shotgun and drove him to Gainesville?”

  “He was a friend of my brother’s down at the Glades Correctional Unit.”

  “A car thief?”

  “No. He doesn’t know how to steal a car.”

  “But you did?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he tell you he wanted with a car?”

  “He said he needed me to get the car and then drive to Gainesville. He didn’t say anything about killing a cop.”

  “You just thought he brought the shotgun along as a companion?”

  “No. I didn’t know what it was for.”

  “He didn’t tell you why he wanted you to steal a car and drive him to Gainesville?”

  “Not until we got there.”

  “Tell me what he said.” An edge had slipped into Vargas’ voice. He was tired of playing word games with this idiot. “You’ve got one chance here. You tell me what you know and when you knew it and you might have a chance to dodge the attempted murder charge. No more playing dumb. You lie to me and we’re done. You’re on your way to a life sentence. You got me?”

  “Yes. He told me on the way up that he’d been hired to kill somebody. We were going to do it out on the highway. I-75. I’d pull up to the car and he’d shoot and we’d be on our way back to Orlando. He had an iPad and he kept checking on something, so he knew exactly where the car we were looking for was located.”

  “What made you get involved?”

  “Skeeter paid me two grand.”

  “How do I find Skeeter?” Vargas asked.

  “I don’t know. I promise. I’d tell you if I knew. I didn’t know he was trying to kill a cop. I wouldn’t have gone with him if I had known.”

  “I don’t have anything else. Detective Duncan?”

  “Who was the guy in the van?” J.D. asked.

  “What van?”

  “The one that was behind me on I-75 when you passed me. The one that was your backup.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Honestly.”

  J.D. stared at him, her face impassive, giving him a look I’d seen only once before. It was hard and scary enough to frighten a dead man. “You listen to me, you little bastard. You tried to kill me. I had to shoot your buddy in the van. You come clean or there’s no deal. You got me?”

  “I don’t know who he was or where to find him.”

  “He’s in the morgue in Gainesville.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Yes. I killed him.”

  Duhns was near tears. “If I knew who he was, I’d tell you. Please believe me.”

  J.D. looked at Vargas. “I don’t have any more questions, Detective. Thank you for letting me sit in.”

  Vargas stared hard at Duhns for a minute or two. Duhns sat still at first, but then began to fidget under the detective’s hard gaze. Finally, Duhns said, “Do I need to sign some papers or something?”

  “Papers? For what?”

  “Our deal.”

  “There is no deal. You lied to me.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You told me you didn’t take the car.”

  “Yeah, but then I told you the truth.”

  “You’ve got a point, Xavier, but there’s still the principle. You lied to a police officer. You’ll be with us for a while, I think.”

  “Life?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “When?”

  “As soon as I
find Skeeter.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3

  “THAT GUY’S AN idiot,” Vargas said as we sat in Howell’s office.

  “Most of them are,” J.D. said.

  “I guess you don’t see much of his type on Longboat Key.”

  “More than you would expect, but I was in homicide with Miami-Dade PD before I moved to Longboat, so I’ve seen my share of idiots.”

  “I bet. What about you, Matt? You’ve been very quiet today.”

  “Not a natural state, I assure you,” J.D. said. “Matt’s a lawyer.”

  “And I thought he was a nice guy,” Vargas said.

  “He has his moments. I think it’s mostly because he’s retired and doesn’t think like a lawyer anymore.”

  “All right,” I said. “You guys have your fun.”

  Howell came through the door. “Okay. I’ve got Skeeter. I talked to the warden at Glades Correctional. Skeeter’s real name is Jerry Evans. He was released about two weeks ago after he completed almost all of a five-year sentence for aggravated assault. I also talked to his parole officer. We’ll pick him up today. J.D., you guys are welcome to come back this afternoon. I’ll hold the interview until you’re ready.”

  She looked at me and I nodded. “We’ve got nothing better to do.”

  * * *

  We were in downtown Orlando in time for our one o’clock lunch meeting with my former law partner, Paul Linder. Paul was one of the best lawyers I’d ever met and a font of lawyer gossip in Central Florida. He was a congenial soul who worked hard and spent a lot of time with other lawyers over lunch or drinks after work. His grandfather had settled in the Orlando area in the 1920s and the Linders had lived in the area ever since. I knew he would be able to answer a lot of the questions I had about D. Wesley Gilbert, Esquire.

  After we’d chatted a bit about all kinds of things, I said, “Paul, what can you tell me about Wes Gilbert?”

  He chuckled. “Why in the world do you want to know anything about that guy?”

  J.D. explained Gilbert’s possible connection to some pretty bad people and a lot of money and how it might have something to do with a murder case she was working.