Shadows Read online

  Corso whistled through his teeth. “Somebody sure didn’t like him. What was he into?”

  “The follow-ups all state that the victim’s character was never in question. Nolan was an Eagle Scout, an athlete, World War II hero, a family man—and an honest politician.”

  “Ha! Ain’t no such animal,” Corso said. “Not in Miami, anyway.”

  “The original investigators dug deep into his background and came up dry. Nolan was pushed to run for senator, according to news clips in that box on my desk. Said he had no plans to get back into politics until his kids were grown.

  “A thousand people at his funeral, including the governor,” Burch said. “Never came up with a motive. That’s what made it tough. Usually, the more money the victim has, the more suspects.

  “We have to meet that Kiki gal and the property owner at the site at eleven. Stone, call your buddies in Forensics, see if we can get some talent down there. We need a metal detector, a photographer, a video camera, whatever.”

  Stone reacted, his look exasperated.

  “This is nothing but a minor diversion,” Burch assured him. “The lieutenant’s hot on it. The sooner we do it, the sooner we get it out of the way.”

  “I pulled my case file yesterday,” Stone protested.

  “Good. Tomorrow we go through it, brainstorm, and see what we come up with.” Burch checked his watch. “Maybe even today, if we can wrap this in a hurry.”

  “Count me in,” Corso said. “Don’t mind hanging with that Kiki babe. She’s got something going on.”

  “Uh-oh,” Nazario said sotto voce. “Speak of the devil. Is that who I think it is in the lieutenant’s office?”

  “Holy crap, what’s she doing here now?” Burch asked.

  “Where’s her pith helmet?” Corso said. “She takin’ a safari?”

  Kiki Courtelis gave them a breezy Miss America wave. She wore a gauzy white cotton shirt with sleeves that buttoned at the wrist, khaki trousers with a series of sturdy, zippered pockets in the side seams, and leather boots. The detectives eyed her bulging, ever-present briefcase suspiciously as she and the lieutenant joined them.

  “Mind if I hitch a ride with you guys?” Kiki said sweetly.

  The lieutenant nodded.

  “Sure,” Burch said.

  “I can be your navigator,” Kiki offered. “The Shadows isn’t easy to find—and my car’s in the shop.”

  “We could probably manage to locate the crime scene on our own,” Corso said. “That’s why they call us detectives.”

  Even with Kiki Courtelis’s help, it was nearly noon before they found the Shadows’s hidden gravel driveway. Masked by an overgrowth of dense foliage it was nearly invisible. They had passed it twice. Maidenhair ferns sprouted from fissures in stone gateposts covered by tangled vines and towering bougainvillea that cascaded like a brilliant crimson waterfall across the gravel drive. A wrought-iron gate, rusted off its hinges, had been all but devoured by the relentless semitropical vegetation that had totally enveloped it.

  “This climate eats up everything sooner or later,” Burch said.

  “Mostly sooner,” Corso muttered. He and Nazario sat in the backseat of the unmarked Chrysler with Kiki Courtelis. “I keep trying to place your perfume,” Corso told her. “What is that scent you’re wearin’?”

  “Mosquito repellent,” she said, amused. “We’ll need it. I’ve got extra.”

  “We’re okay,” Burch said.

  “Suit yourself,” she said, entertaining them with a brief history of the house while they waited for the developer. “There was nothing else here when Captain Cliff Nolan built this place in the twenties. He had reason to want seclusion. Captain Nolan was a rumrunner, a smuggler. This site, on a limestone ridge with access to the water, was perfect. He brought workers from Jamaica to quarry the oolite out of the ground to build the house and the gateposts.

  “Many of the local pioneers used that type of limestone. It comes out of the ground pure white, soft enough to cut with saws. After exposure to the air, it hardens, darkens, and you can see all the little seashells and fossils in it. Those houses are rare now, one reason it should be preserved.

  “Another is that it’s a historic site. Captain Cliff was an adventurer, one of South Florida’s most notorious and colorful pioneers. A marks-man, a deep-sea captain, a born risk taker. He smuggled illegal booze in from the islands during Prohibition, ran it all the way up the coast as far as Rumson, New Jersey.

  “On one run, the feds and local police up there were waiting to intercept his boat, the Sea Wolf. When Nolan refused to surrender, they opened fire. He dumped the booze over the side and shot back. Two lawmen were killed in a wild, running gun battle. A dozen boats chased the Sea Wolf all the way down the coast. Nolan knew every inlet, had friends at every pit stop along the way. He managed to elude capture and make it back here. Shortly after that, under pressure, I guess, the local sheriff raided the Shadows.

  “A posse surrounded the house, armed to the teeth and ready for a fight. Captain Cliff had sworn that it was his castle and he’d never let them onto his property.

  “But he wasn’t home. Must have been tipped off. There were all kinds of characters here then. Al Capone wintered in Miami Beach. The locals loved Scarface. The law didn’t. Captain Cliff was considered a local hero, a Robin Hood type.

  “Miami was pretty wild then.”

  “Nothing’s changed,” Corso said.

  “The sheriff and his men confiscated five hundred bottles of illegal liquor from the Shadows that day. A photograph of the deputies with the contraband was published in the Miami Metropolis, the local paper. I’ve seen that picture in the archives at the South Florida Historical Museum. But Nolan was never arrested or tried.”

  “Where the hell’s the developer?” Burch scowled at his watch. “Maybe he’s waiting up at the house.” He maneuvered the unmarked around the remnants of the old gate, fallen palm fronds, and wind-blown branches. “What eventually happened to Captain Nolan? He meet a bad end?”

  “No one is certain,” Kiki said. “The Nolan family plot is in the old Miami cemetery, but his name isn’t there. There was a story that he and the Sea Wolf were lost in a storm off the coast of Cuba. His son, Pierce, your murder victim, was still a small boy. He was raised at the Shadows. Went to Miami High, played football, worked hard, was successful, and built a reputation as straight and civic minded as his father was notorious. He raised his own family here. Three daughters, Spring, Summer, and Brooke, and a son, Sky, the youngest.

  “He and his wife, Diana, opened the Shadows up to the community with chamber music recitals and parties, made it into a showplace. He served a term as mayor, was well liked and respected. People said he was a man with no enemies.”

  Despite the sun, high in the sky, it was as dark as a tunnel as the unmarked crunched slowly along the winding gravel driveway beneath a tangled canopy of black olive, ficus, and royal poinciana trees in brilliant bloom.

  A raucous flock of bright green-and-yellow parakeets suddenly swooped out of the trees, shrieking angrily at the intruders.

  “Look it ’em. Hundreds of ’em,” Corso said.

  “Monk parakeets,” Nazario said. “Smart as hell. Can learn to talk if you capture them young enough. Hand raised, they’re great pets. They’ll eat mangoes, seeds, and nuts right outta your hand. But ones who grow up in the wild like these aren’t people friendly. They bite and scratch.”

  Kiki nodded. “Their predators are raccoons, foxes, pet cats—and us.”

  “How is that cat you took home from the Beach?” Nazario asked Burch.

  “Terrific. Was worried at first ’cause the only thing Max, our big, dopey sheepdog, barks at is cats. But he’s so dense, didn’t even notice there was a cat in the house for three days. Can’t see a thing with all that hair hanging in his face. I always knew that dog had no natural animal instincts.

  “On the fourth day, he wanders into the kitchen for a drink, and yikes! A cat’s drinking out
of his dish! He puts on the brakes, does a double take. The cat keeps drinking, watching ’im out the corner of one eye. They say people worshiped cats a couple a thousand years ago. This one must a never forgot it. The dog’s jaw drops, he backs up, then goes berserk, barking like hell, trying to catch him, crashing into walls and furniture.”

  “So what happened?” Nazario said.

  Burch shrugged. “Forty-eight hours later, he’s totally intimidated. You open the door to let him in, and if the cat’s anywhere in sight, Max’ll circle the entire house to avoid walking past him. Takes no chances. Won’t go within six feet of him. Doesn’t trust him, thinks cats are too unpredictable.”

  “Like women,” Corso said.

  The birds’ shrill, earsplitting screeches escalated.

  “They build multi-room, multi-family nests, like condos,” Kiki said wistfully. “Generation after generation use the same nests. They’ll be homeless when these trees are bulldozed.”

  “Yeah, if they could talk,” Nazario said, “you know what words they’d be using.”

  The birds screamed louder.

  Corso shifted uneasily in his seat, scanned the sky, and scowled. “It’s like that damn Hitchcock movie.

  “Hey! We’re getting the message!” he shouted at the noisy protesters.

  The car bounced around a final rutted curve and the Shadows stood before them.

  No one spoke. The car’s occupants held their breath. The angled rays of the high summer sun and dappled reflections off the water slanted between the trees behind the house. The effect was one of a dark energy emanating from inside, as though its cracked and broken windows were illuminated from within by the light from ancient exploding stars.

  The wide front door hung open, a seductive invitation to a dark interior veiled by dust motes that glittered in the spectral greenish glow of light filtered through chlorophyll.

  “Dios mío,” Nazario murmured under his breath.

  “This is it,” Kiki whispered.

  In its abandonment, the Shadows had become half-hidden, dwarfed by the lush and verdant, wild and overgrown subtropical forest around it. Nature had become part of the house. They were as one.

  Creeping vines and the winding, intrusive roots of a walking banyan tree had crept over the hanging wraparound porch. A strangler fig tree had attached itself to a copper rain gutter, then climbed up to traverse the tin roof. Native lignum vitae and ficus trees towered over the Shadows, which was surrounded by stands of palm trees: sabal, royal, Keys thatch, and areca.

  The jasmine had run amok and yellow-and-black long-winged butterflies fluttered among the intricate purple flowers on passion vines that had swallowed the porch railings.

  “Look at those vines,” Kiki Courtelis whispered. “The early Spanish thought that the Passiflora’s three-part stigma represented the nails used in the Crucifixion and that the five stamens signified Christ’s wounds.”

  “The developer ain’t here yet,” Corso said. “Or he gave up on us and left while we were still trying to find this godforsaken place.”

  Ripe mangoes lay everywhere, rotting on the ground, unharvested and forgotten.

  “Look it that,” Corso complained, climbing out of the car. “I got a mango tree I can’t get the first piece a fruit outta. Pruned it, mulched it, sprayed it. Spent a fortune on fertilizer. Wound up with one lousy mango that never got ripe. One! Damn thing must a cost me a hundred bucks. Nobody’s touched these trees for years, and look it that, a bumper crop all over the ground.”

  He picked one up. Round, firm, and fragrant, the color of a summer sunset.

  “Ya know, somebody tol’ me that when a tree doesn’t produce, you should take a baseball bat to it. Just beat the living crap out of it and it’ll get scared into producing fruit. Ya know, it feels threatened, that it’s gonna die, and starts to deliver.”

  “Good idea. Maybe I could try it on detectives who don’t produce,” Burch said mildly.

  “Where’s Edelman?” Stone frowned. “He should have been here already.”

  “We already have permission. We can start without ’im.” Burch stepped carefully around the wicked spines and red flowers of a crown of thorns. Like drops of blood, they crowded the stepping stones from the driveway to the front stoop.

  “Listen,” Kiki Courtelis said.

  They heard the rumbling of a big engine and wide tires on the gravel drive.

  Is that what the killer heard that night as he waited in ambush? Burch’s eyes roved the property, then met Stone’s. He knew he and the young detective wondered the same thing. Where was the gunman concealed? He sighed as Stone shook his head. The untended foliage was so wild and overgrown, it was impossible to tell. Hell, it had been more than forty years.

  Stone took the Rolatape, a digital tape measure on wheels, out of the car trunk, along with his own camera and a sketch pad.

  The approaching vehicle swept around the final curve into view. An SUV, a silver Lincoln Navigator.

  “That’s him,” Kiki Courtelis murmured in disgust, “the worst pirate to plunder South Florida since the sixteenth century.”

  Jay Edelman, toned, tanned, and well-manicured, was in no hurry. Cell phone to his ear, he was in excellent shape for a man in his fifties. His shades were expensive, his silk shirt sea-foam green, his pale trousers linen, and his shiny loafers Ferragamo.

  “Gentlemen.” He snapped the cell phone shut. “And the ubiquitous Ms. Kiki Courtelis. Why am I not surprised? She’s everywhere, protesting my permits at City Hall, presenting petitions at public gatherings, a very busy girl.

  “Don’t tell me she’s the reason you’re here?” He turned to the detectives.

  “Routine,” Burch said, introducing himself and the others. “The homicide here was high-profile, so we decided to update our records while it’s still possible.”

  “Help yourselves, Detectives. Isn’t it a fabulous piece of property?” He stood in front of the Shadows, basking in his pride of ownership. “Look around. What do you see? A jungle. A raw, overgrown, underdeveloped piece of land. You know what I see? One hundred and thirty thousand feet of luxury waterfront condo living. Two hundred and fiftytwo units. Just four apartments to a floor, the smallest, three thousand square feet under air, the largest, forty-two hundred square feet. Ten-foot ceilings, twenty-five hundred feet of twelve-foot-wide wraparound balconies with summer kitchens outside.”

  “The price tags?” Burch asked.

  “Apartments will range from two-point-five to five million.” He shrugged. “Each owner will have a private two-car enclosed parking space in the main garage and each will spend an average extra million dollars on upgrades and interiors.”

  “What are you calling it?” Nazario asked.

  The latest trend for new luxury condos rising all over Miami was one-word names: Onyx, Everglades, Apogee, Continuum…

  The developer’s face lit up. “We considered Utopia, Elysium, or Paradisio, but after Ms. Kiki Courtelis was kind enough to bring it to everyone’s attention, we opted to keep the historic name—Shadows. Part of the sales pitch, it has a certain appeal, a theme.

  “A tile mural will dominate one wall of the lobby: the famous rum-runner, what’s ’is name? The old captain at the helm of his trusty boat crashing through a stormy sea.” He chortled.

  “The residents’ private lounge will be called the Rumrunner.” His smile widened. “I even offered Ms. Courtelis a consulting job with our interior designer. The offer is still open.”

  He winked at Kiki, who turned her back.

  Edelman’s cell phone rang and he wandered off for a brief conversation, then returned, checking his expensive gold watch.

  “How did you happen to acquire the house?” Burch asked.

  “Saw it from my company’s chopper, out scouting waterfront properties. Had my eye on it for a long time.” He rubbed his palms together. “One of the last undeveloped parcels on the bay, in the same family since the twenties, believe it or not. Took some time to track down
the out-of-state owner. Once she heard our offer, she was happy to unload it.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking…?” Burch said.

  “Forty million.” The developer smiled.

  “Jesus,” Stone said.

  Nazario gave a long, low whistle.

  “People unfamiliar with the local market are always shocked at how much waterfront property values have escalated. I’m sure it was a windfall for the widow. Old what’s-his-name, the captain, probably paid twenty bucks an acre back in his day. Let’s just say the owner was thrilled. So am I. In this area, it’s a bargain.

  “Look, you don’t need me for this,” Edelman said. His heavy onyx ring gleamed dark in the light filtering through the trees. “Be careful if you go inside. The place could fall down around your ears.”

  “No way, Edelman,” Kiki sputtered. “This house weathered hurricanes before you were born. It wouldn’t look bad if you hadn’t deliberately exposed it to the elements so it would deteriorate.”

  “Not me,” he said smoothly. He shook his head. “It must have been the homeless. You know how they break into vacant buildings, take over, and do irreparable damage.” He took a last eager look around. “We’re about to break ground,” he said, “on the most exciting project in South Florida.”

  Kiki was fuming. “He set the house up for demolition,” she said as Edelman’s SUV disappeared around the big curve of the winding driveway. “He did the same thing to an irreplaceable Art Deco hotel in South Beach’s historic district,” she raged, loud enough for Stone to hear. He was taking notes, measuring the distance from the front porch to the driveway.

  “He made a deal with the city to construct a high-rise tower on the Beach. The condition was that he preserve and restore the historic three-story hotel already on the property. He agreed, then broke out the windows, removed the doors, and exposed the old building to rodents, insects, wind, rain, and salt spray. Then he convinced the city it was unsafe, impossible to save or restore. The city condemned it, knocked it down, and gave him permission to increase the size of his project. That’s his MO, how he skirts the law. He should be in jail.”