Charles Willeford - Sideswipe Read online

  "Who gave you this list?"

  "The manager. Carstairs. Then I talked to the tenants."

  "Let's take another trip down there, Figueras. My father's wife's got an apartment there, and I promised her I'd check it out. She hasn't been in it for several months, so she might have something missing, too."

  "Your stepmother has an apartment there?"

  "Stepmother--come on. We're about the same age; she's just my father's second wife."

  "Sorry."

  "No cause to be. Technically, I guess she is my stepmother, but I've never thought of her that way. My kids call her Helen, not Grandma."

  "Want to take my car?"

  "No, you go ahead. I'll ride my daughter's bike down and take my trunks. After we check things out, I'll swim in the pool. I'd invite you, too, but a guest can't invite another guest."

  "I got plenty to do back at the station. I really should come over here to the beach more often, but somehow, when I get through work and go home, I just don't think about it."

  "You married?"

  "No, but I got a live-in. Girl works at the International Mall. Suave Shoes. Nothing serious. She just wanted to get away from her parents and couldn't afford a place of her own."

  "Lot of girls like that nowadays, it seems."

  Figueras shrugged. "One, anyway."

  Mr. Carstairs, a tanned, middle-aged man wearing khaki cargo shorts, a short-sleeved blue workshirt, and a pair of blue felt house slippers, was outside by the Supermare swimming pool. With a twelve-foot skimmer he was scooping dead dragonflies and bits of dried grass from the surface of the pool. When Hoke introduced himself, Carstairs put the skimmer down, nodded at Figueras, and lighted a menthol True.

  "Your stepmother already called me about you, Mr. Moseley. The pooi's open from nine to nine, but there's no lifeguard so you swim at your own risk. And no children are allowed."

  "That's what Mrs. Moseley told me. Suppose I want to swim earlier, say, six or six-thirty in the morning?"

  "I don't enforce the rules. I live over in Riviera, so I don't get here till around eight. But Mrs. Andrews, who lives right over there in 101-A, has threatened to shoot anyone who goes in before nine A.M. with her BB gun." Carstairs laughed harshly, and it brought on a paroxysm of coughing. His body doubled over and his face turned bright red. He clutched the back of an aluminum beach chair for support, coughed some more, and finally managed to take another short drag on his cigarette. That seemed to work; he stopped coughing.

  "You okay?" Hoke asked.

  Carstairs nodded, catching his breath. "It's the damned menthol. I might as well have stuck with the Camels. 'Course I don't think she'd really do it, Mrs. Andrews, with the gun. But she said she would, and ever since she made her threat at the monthly meeting, nobody's taken a chance. She brought her Red Ryder BB rifle to the meeting to show she had one."

  "In that case," Hoke said, "I'll abide by the rules." He took one of the folded lists out of his pocket and handed it to Carstairs. "You got any more additions to your list? Any more reported thefts?"

  Carstairs ran a finger down the list and shook his head. "No, this is complete. But a lot of people are still away for the summer. When people get back, there may be more. I haven't inventoried any of the unoccupied apartments because I don't know what's supposed to be there in the first place. And even if the apartments are messed up, the owners could've left them that way when they went north."

  "I understand."

  "As a matter of routine," Figueras said, "I checked both pawnshops in town, but nothing showed up. These aren't the kind of things people would pawn anyway. A Corot, for example, worth maybe a hundred thousand bucks, wouldn't be fenced, either. A painting that valuable's usually held for ransom from the insurance company."

  "I don't know what else to tell you, Mr. Moseley," Carstairs said. "We've got a twenty-four-hour guard on the gate, but the owners voted down a TV surveillance system. Most of the people living here are old enough to go to bed early. After ten at night, the gate guard checks the lobby and the pool area every hour or so."

  "Have you got keys to all of the apartments?" Hoke asked.

  "Sure. It's the law. I've got a master through-the-doorknob key, and those who've added bolt locks are required to give me the extra key. I keep 'em on a board in my office."

  "What about the exterminator?"

  "He's on a monthly schedule. I send out a mimeographed notice for the day and hours he's here, and they're supposed to let him in to spray. When he finishes all of the occupied apartments he comes back to me, and then I go with him while he works through the unoccupied units. If people are here, and don't let him in, they don't get sprayed, that's all. Our contract's with Cliffdweller's Exterminators, and they're bonded. They do most of the condos on the island."

  "What about U.P.S., and other deliveries?"

  "The gate guard signs, and then takes the packages up himself. And that includes pizza deliveries. That way"-- Carstairs !aughed--"the guard gets the tip the delivery man should get. Why not? We only pay the guards four bucks an hour."

  "When he's on an upper floor making a delivery, the gate isn't covered."

  "That's true. But it's locked. Nobody has to wait very long, and all the owners can open the gate with their plastic cards. There haven't been any complaints--except from pizza delivery men." Carstairs laughed harshly and fell into another spate of coughing. He sat heavily on a webbed beach chair, gasping for almost a minute before he recovered his breath. "Not everybody living here knows about these burglaries, but when the place begins to fill up again in November, and it turns out that some more absentee owners have been ripped off, there'll be hell to pay, and I'll be blamed. I like this job. I managed a condo in North Miami Beach for three years before coming up here, and they all complained down there because they thought I was overpaid. Twenty-two thousand a year, and they thought I was overpaid. Here, everybody thinks I'm -under-paid, and I get plenty of tips and sympathy."

  "How much do you get here?"

  "The same twenty-two a year. It's the going scale for a condo this size, but these wealthy people, who think I'm scraping along, don't ask me to do much of anything. Down in N.M.B., some of those old ladies even expected me to drive 'em to the fucking grocery store. I do real well here at Christmas, too. Absentee owners send me fruit from that place in Oregon. Last year I got four lugs of Comice pears."

  "Next time you have a meeting," Hoke suggested, "why not have Detective Figueras give the owners a little pep talk on security. Anybody who's away for six months or more and leaves jewelry in his apartment is also leaving a cold trail if it's stolen."

  "Would you do that, Officer Figueras?" Carstairs asked.

  "Sure. It might take the pressure off both of us. Just call me at the station a day or two before you have a meeting."

  "Thanks, Mr. Carstairs," Hoke said. "We're going to look around a little."

  The manager nodded and lighted another cigarette with his Zippo. Hoke and Figueras got into the elevator, and Hoke punched the PH button.

  "Thanks for the volunteer lecture," Figueras said. "But it's a little late now, isn't it, for a talk on security?"

  "If they aren't doing the things you tell 'em, it might get Carstairs off the hook. He seems like a decent guy."

  "Yeah, he does. But he ought to switch back to Camels soon. Those menthol cigarettes are killing him."

  The elevator stopped at the roof exit, and the door opened automatically. They stepped onto a railed redwood deck that covered a fifty-foot square of the flat roof. Part of the deck had aluminum roofing, in blue and white panels. There was a metal blue-and-white patio set of table and four chairs beneath the roof section. The table and all four chairs were bolted to the deck to prevent strong winds from blowing them away. One twin-glass floor-to-ceiling window faced the deck, but the red vertical Levolors were closed. Hoke pressed the white button beside the doubledoor entrance to the penthouse. Figueras took out a crumpled package of Lucky Strikes and a book of mat
ches from his jacket pocket, looked at them for a moment, and put them back. While they waited, Hoke looked out over the ocean. From this height it resembled an ironed sheet of Mylar. Out in the Gulf Stream, four or five miles away, three tankers steamed south. Thanks to them, Hoke reflected, the soles and toes of hundreds of feet would collect little pieces of tar when they walked on the beach. All of the motels and apartment houses kept metal containers of benzine and paper towels by the outside showers so that bathers could clean it off their feet. The tar was worse this year than Hoke could ever remember it.

  Mr. E. M. Skinner, wearing royal blue slippers and a yellow silk happi coat over his purple silk pajamas, opened the door. He blinked in the strong sunlight.

  "I was taking a nap," Skinner said. "I thought I heard the bell, but I wasn't sure. Today's Hirohito's day off."

  "Hirohito?" Hoke took off his sunglasses.

  Skinner smiled. "My Japanese houseboy. Actually, he's a Nisei, and his real name's Paul Glenwood. I sometimes call him Hirohito just to kid around. Come in, gentlemen."

  "This is Detective Figueras," Hoke said. "He's the Riviera officer investigating the burglaries you were telling me about down on the beach."

  Skinner nodded and shook hands with Figueras. "I think Carstairs mentioned your name to me." Hoke walked inside before Skinner could shake his hand and looked around the living room.

  The room was large but seemed bigger because it was so sparsely furnished. There was a polished parquet floor, with no rugs to hide it. At the northern end of the room there was a grouping of leather overstuffed chairs and small black lacquered tables. A bar, covered in black leather and with two red-cushioned rattan stools, was directly behind the grouping. The other end of the room, apparently a dining area, was furnished with a glass-topped mahogany table and eight cushioned, wrought-iron chairs. A Nautilus machine, with four brown leather roller pads, incongruously occupied the space between the conversation area and the dining setup. There was a long pass-way counter into the kitchen, but the counter had a pull-down door, and it was closed. Hoke could see only part of the kitchen through the opened doorway. There were a half-dozen closed doors along the hallway, so Hoke concluded that Skinner had separate rooms for work and for play, and at least three bedrooms.

  "I was telling Sergeant Moseley, Mr. Figueras," Skinner said with a thin smile, "I don't have my daily martinis until five, but that restriction doesn't hold for you. What will you gentlemen have?"

  "I guess I could stand a beer," Figueras said.

  "Nothing for me, thanks," Hoke said.

  Skinner went behind the bar and rubbed his hands together. "Michelob okay?"

  "Anything that's cold," Figueras said.

  Skinner opened the bottle and poured part of it into a glass, then set the glass and bottle on the bar. Figueras had his Luckies and matches out. He looked at the bar, and at the tables, but there were no ashtrays. For the second time, Figueras put his cigarettes away. One of the small lacquered tables held two elaborately carved wooden fishes. There were floor-to-ceiling windows on three of the walls, but the closed vertical Levolors darkened the room. The track lighting above the bar was on dimly. There was a chandelier above the dining table, but it wasn't lighted.

  "When you first heard about the burglaries, Mr. Skinner," Hoke asked, "did you check your own apartment for missing items?"

  "I didn't have to check. I'm here all year round. And when I'm not here, Hirohito's here."

  "You two are never out at the same time?"

  "I didn't mean that. I mean, Paul lives in. He has his own bedroom. Sometimes when I go out at night he drives me. When I go to a party in Palm Beach I like to have two or three drinks, and I won't risk a D.U.I. Two double martinis, even watered down with ice, will register a big point one-four on the Breathalyzer, I've heard."

  "It depends on the size of the person," Figueras said, taking a sip from his glass. "But they've been cracking down on drunk drivers. People who used to get a warning are now either doing a little jail time or community service."

  "What kind of community service would I do," Skinner said, smiling, "if I happened to get caught? Not that I ever will, of course."

  "It's up to the judge. But a Palm Beach corporation lawyer, two weeks ago, was assigned to work for sixty days putting on a new tar-and-pebble roof on school buildings in the county. Working with boiling tar, out in the sun all day, is pretty rough community service for a lawyer. But a barmaid I know got off easy. She licked stamps in the judge's office when he ran for reelection. They haven't established any firm guidelines yet, so it's still up to the whim of the judge."

  Hoke cleared his throat. "So you haven't missed anything?"

  "Not a thing. And if something was missing, Paul would tell me."

  "I notice you don't have any paintings."

  "I have paintings. A man has to have some collectibles for diversification. But I keep my paintings in my strong room, together with my certificates and Krugerrands and so on. No one goes in there but me. Not even my houseboy has the combination. I had the strong room put in while the Supermare was still under construction."

  "What kind of paintings?"

  "Well, I've got five Picassos--drawings, not paintings-- and two Milton Averys."

  "Could we take a look at them?"

  "They're investments, not for showing. I'd be glad to show them to you, but they're wrapped up in brown paper and sealed. When Milton Avery died, my Averys almost doubled in value, but I don't like either one of them. Collectibles are just a hedge against inflation, as we say."

  "Figueras," Hoke said, "would you mind going outside on the deck to finish your beer and smoke a cigarette for a few minutes?"

  "Why?"

  "Because I asked you in a nice way, and I know you want a smoke." Hoke put his sunglasses on the bar.

  Figueras gave Hoke a look and poured the rest of the beer into his glass. Then he lighted a Lucky, took the glass of beer with him, and went out through the front door. As the door clicked behind Figueras, Hoke took a step forward and hit Skinner in the stomach with his right fist. The blow was hard and unexpected, and air whooshed from Skinner's lips in a strangled scream of fear, pain, and surprise. He clutched his stomach with both hands as he dropped to the floor, and kept making little ah, ah, ah sounds as he struggled for breath. This man, Hoke thought, has never been hurt before. Except for a toothache, maybe, he has never known any real pain. Certainly Skinner was handling his pain in a craven way. He drummed on the floor with his heels until his slippers fell off. When he regained his breath he began to cry, and he crawled backward away from Hoke. His fingers, scrabbling behind him, could get very little purchase on the polished floor. It took almost half a minute before his back hit the black leather chair behind him. His eyes popped wildly as he stared up at Hoke, and tears ran down his cheeks. He pressed his fingers into his stomach gently. "You--you broke something inside..."

  Hoke nodded. "Lots of little things. Capillaries, for the most part, and some muscle shredding, but I was an inch or so below the solar plexus. Haven't you ever been hit in the belly before?"

  Skinner shook his head. "Jesus Christ, that hurt! It still hurts!"

  Hoke took Skinner's right hand and pulled him to his feet. He twisted the unresisting arm behind Skinner's back, and then put some upward pressure on it.

  Skinner squealed. "Jesus Christ, man!"

  "Let's go take a look in your strong room, Skinner. I want to check your collectibles against my property list."

  "It's all there: Sergeant, every bit of it! You're breaking my goddamned arm!"

  It was all there: the brown-tone cartoon; the tiny Corot, only twelve by fourteen inches, but with a gilded frame; and the Giacometti sculpture, an anorectic figure a foot high, mounted on a thick ebony base. The Klezmer turned out to be a painting of a tiny piece of yarn, about one inch in length, but the picture was in a two-by-two-foot black frame. A small magnifying glass was attached to the frame by a chain so a viewer could see all of the yarn
's delicately painted hairs. The jewelry, and there was a good deal of it, including the elephant-hair bracelets, was all wrapped neatly in white tissue paper and packed in a cardboard box.

  Skinner now sat in a leather chair. His face was a mixture of pink and gray. He was calmer now, but he covered his face with his hands. After Hoke checked off all the items on his list, he patted Skinner on the shoulder.

  "Don't worry," he said, "you aren't going to jail. I wouldn't want something like this to get into the papers. It would be bad for the island and bad for the Supermare. My father's wife still has an apartment here, and it might make the value go down."

  "I wasn't going to keep any of these things," Skinner said, looking up and wiping fresh tears from his eyes. "I'm not a thief--I don't even know how you knew I--"

  "I didn't know. But I suspected you. I've got a good memory for details sometimes, Skinner. When Helen told me that Mr. Olsen and Mrs. Higdon were instrumental in getting you out of office, and then their names popped up on the list, I figured it had to be you. As the ex-president of the board, you still had a key to the office, so you probably found a way to get into any apartment you wanted to. Isn't that right?"

  "I gave my master key back to Carstairs, but I had a duplicate made first in your father's hardware store. I thought that was how you found out."

  "I never considered that. I suppose he still has a sales slip on file. But I just figured you went into the office at night, took the extra bolt-lock keys, and then swiped the stuff at your leisure. If I wasn't on the verge of quitting the police force, I wouldn't have hit you. I've been a cop for more than fourteen years, and you're the first suspect I've ever hit. I'd better get Figueras." Hoke put on his dark glasses and adjusted them.

  "What'll he do? I mean--"

  "By now, he'll need another beer. Put your slippers back on and open him another cold one."