PART IV A SUDDEN DEATH #3
In his lawsuit, Bill Brewster had accused Tad Kingman of using convict workers at his petrochemical facilities and then keeping them on trumped-up debt charges.
Apparently, when Kingman’s convict labourers worked at his complexes, they stayed and ate in barracks on site, the costs of which he had them pay off through work.
Thus: peonage.
The lawyer in me thought it was a stretch, not least because Brewster didn’t have standing to sue: he wasn’t the one being held against his will.
The judge thought the same.
He’d labelled the whole suit an elaborate extortion attempt and an abuse of process and thrown it out. In addition, because of the explosive nature of the allegations, he’d suppressed it.
I was pondering this when Eleanor Gage returned. She was a short, skinny woman with sun-weathered skin. She looked just like her brother.
I saw her arrive at the trailer in bay 14 and rush inside.
As I stepped up to her open front door, I saw Eleanor hurriedly hurling all of her possessions into some suitcases: clothes, shoes, everything.
I introduced myself but she barely registered my name.
‘I was there when your brother Eli died,’ I said.
That made her stop, if only for a moment.
‘Who’da thought that dumbshit loser brother of mine would be good for anything,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘A lawyer came by a few days ago. Said Eli had died and that as part of some agreement he had, I was to be paid $25,000.’
She reached into her pocket and showed me a cheque. ‘Twenty-five thousand dollars!’
I glimpsed the name of the law firm on the check: dillard & dunne, attorneys at law.
‘An agreement? What kind of agreement?’
‘Damned if I know,’ Eleanor Gage said. ‘Eli wasn’t right in the head, and yeah, when he was younger, he fiddled with some boys and all.
Ended up in those swamps over in Cameron Parish.
I gave him money from time to time. Who knows, maybe he decided to pay me back by donating his body to some cadaver school or somethin’.
I heard you can do that. But twenty-five grand. I ain’t gonna say no to that.’
Her eyes narrowed.
She gripped the cheque more tightly.
‘You ain’t here to try and get it back, are ya?’
‘No. No, ma’am,’ I said. ‘Just trying to tie up a few things, that’s all.’
She resumed her packing and left.
I did, too.
As I drove away from Galveston, I considered these new developments.
Crazy Eli Gage had died with nothing in the world.
And now, out of the blue, his sister had received $25,000.
Because Eli did own something.
His life.
A Sicilian Switch . . .
Yes, that could work . . .
I bit my lip, thinking about the name of the law firm on Eleanor’s cheque: Dillard & Dunne, Attorneys at Law.
Sometimes as an investigator you have to roll the dice.
I pulled over, Googled their phone number and called it.
‘Dillard & Dunne,’ the receptionist answered crisply.
‘Hi, I’m working over here at the Kingman–Dearborn wedding. We just had a worker slip and fall while putting up some outdoor pendant lights and I was told to call you guys.’
The receptionist sighed. ‘Sure. Mr Dillard usually handles Mr Kingman’s work, but for something like this I’ll put you through to his junior associate. Please hold.’
When she put me on hold, I hung up.
I’d got what I needed.
The law firm that had written the cheque to Eleanor Gage worked for Tad Kingman.
It wasn’t proof, but it was another link to the Kingmans.
I called Audrey Mills in Washington.
‘What’s up, Sam?’ She sounded upbeat, excited. Her career was on the rise.
‘Audrey, have you ever heard of a Sicilian Switch?’
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s an old Italian Mafia trick. If a senior mafioso was facing a murder charge, a poor junior member would be paid to take the rap for him. Go to prison, sometimes for life, so the senior guy stayed free.
‘In a Sicilian Switch, a payment is made to the poor guy’s family. The bigger the prison term, the bigger the payment: if the poor guy went to jail for life, it was a windfall, a life-changing payment to his kin.’
‘What’s this got to do with us?’ Audrey asked.
‘Eli Gage’s sister just got a twenty-five-thousand-dollar cheque from a law firm that does work for Tad Kingman.’
Audrey paused. ‘You think Eli took the fall for Kingman? For LaToya and Harriet’s deaths? And for doing that, payment was made to his sister?’
‘Dirt-poor guys like Eli are perfect for a Sicilian Switch. They’re ready-made patsies. They have nothing of value except their lives.’
Audrey said, ‘You’re suggesting that everything we encountered in Dead Man’s Creek—the barge, LaToya Martyn, Eli with his shotgun, our whole fucking shootout—was set up for us to find? A sham? I mean, Sam, it’s a long shot . . .’
I quickly told her about the dead baby’s doctored paternal DNA results and my illegal visit to the morgue.
Before she could stop me, I added, ‘I know, I know, it sounds stupid, but Audrey, it was all too easy. We got there, we found him, we killed him. And then after it all goes down, we both get offered our dream jobs. Jobs, by the way, that’ll take us a long way from here.’
I felt like an idiot saying it out loud.
Judging from the silence on the other end of the phone, Audrey must’ve thought I was insane and I resigned myself to another nice person backing away slowly and exiting my life because I was just too weird.
‘Keep talking,’ she said softly.
I perked up.
She wasn’t backing away.
I dived in. ‘Okay. All of this, in some way, keeps coming back to the Kingman family, so I’ve been doing a little more digging into them.’
I told her about Bill Brewster’s lawsuit against Tad Kingman, about peonage and about Mrs Kingman’s interest in a Confederate statue in Pine Hollow.
‘I want to find out more about them, see if I can find some connection to LaToya Martyn,’ I said. ‘I’m gonna check out the removal of that Confederate statue tomorrow.’
Audrey said, ‘I can’t help you in an official capacity, but call me if you need anything.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And Sam?’
‘Yeah?’
‘Don’t become another missing investigator. Be careful.’
‘I will.’
I hung up.
Thinking of the Kingmans made me think about someone else.
Cyrus Barbin.
Still parked on the shoulder of the road, I climbed into the rear living area of my Minnie Winnie and switched on my digital whiteboard.
I brought up the notes I’d made after our meeting with Cyrus at Angola:
CYRUS BARBIN
Knew baby was found near Victorville.
Knew about brEWSTER, missing private detective from 1988.
Mentioned ‘Bubba’s party’
SLAVERS’ KEY – old gator farm – at ‘the duke’s estate’?
‘The bishop’s collection – his baker’s dozen’ – Kept under LaSalle mausoleum at ‘old priests’ graveyard out past the end of the world’
Drowned during Hurricane Andrew.
‘Good ones’ transported out.
‘Bad ones’ thrown to ‘Goliath’.
‘They’re definitely gonna kill you. They kill anybody who gets too close.’
The empire.
Cyrus had known a lot about the Kingmans and their society world, including in his childhood playing at a property once known as Slavers’ Key but now called Gulf Key. As Audrey had discovered, it was in Duke County, Florida.
I grabbed my phone and brought up Linc Lewis’s contact details.
Linc answered on the fifth ring.
‘Heya, Sammy! How are ya, little buddy?’
Linc was always like that, bright and chirpy.
As I mentioned earlier, he was a young private investigator from Tampa and we often worked together, usually on skip traces.
Tall, blond, broad-shouldered and charming, Linc had been on the football team at Florida State. He rarely wore shoes, practically living in his fluorescent yellow-and-green Hurley flip-flops. He slept with a lot of women.
It’s safe to say that we were not alike in any discernible way.
I could tell you the precise chemical reaction that made a flash-bang grenade detonate, while Linc could tell you—as he’d once told me—that Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’ is about a woman giving a man oral sex. (Look it up.)
I invested my money in stable dividend stocks and term deposits. He bought Bitcoin and other exotic cryptocurrencies, all of which he kept on a small digital key fob on his key ring.
And yet we got along great.
I said, ‘Hello, Linc. Do you know a place out there called Gulf Key, somewhere south of Tallahassee? It’s in Duke County. Was once called Slavers’ Key.’
‘Can’t say I do. Not much down there so far as I know. Old mines, swamps. Gets wiped out by hurricanes every coupla years. Shit, that area got smoked by Hurricane Helene just last year.’
‘Can you do me a favour?’ I said. ‘Can you go and check it out for me, please? Recent history, police reports, anything out of the ordinary.’
‘What’s up?’
‘An old case resurfaced and it might be part of it.’
‘Sure, buddy. Say, you still eat at that Hooters with your harem of pretty waitresses?’
‘Yes, and they’re not my harem, Linc.’
‘Sam, you’re a smart dude—way smarter than me, that’s for sure—but I’m gonna have to teach you to recognise when ladies love you, and those pretty ladies lurrrrve you. Let me check out your town and get back to ya.’
‘Thanks.’ I hung up.
I speed-dialled my office.
Heidi answered on the first ring. ‘The Detective.’
‘Hi, Heidi. It’s me. Wanna do some field work in New Orleans?’
‘Fuck yeah. What am I looking for?’
‘Looking for an old graveyard at an abandoned property owned by the Catholic Church out at the End of the World swamp. See if you can find a mausoleum there dedicated to someone named LaSalle and if there’s anything strange about it.
I’m told the property has been pretty torn up over the years by storms, so you might need to hire an airboat.
Call Royce Jones at Big Easy Airboat Tours, he owes me a favour. ’
‘That’s okay. My trucker friend, Brenda, has a swamp-runner and she’s always up for an outing. Mind if I stay in the city for a coupla nights after I’m done? Party a bit?’
‘Go for it,’ I said. Heidi liked going to certain bars in New Orleans.
‘On it,’ she said and hung up.