The Marsh Read online

  Harley wiggled in his chair. “When will I know what I get?” he bellowed.

  “There should be at least three months of statements at her place … if she did what I asked. That’ll give me a good idea of where we stand. She paid the mortgage quarterly, so I’ll have to find who she owed it to and contact them. Unfortunately, her checkbook went the way of all her other possessions during the storm, so I don’t know who the mortgage holder is.” Sean giggled. “She said she sent the mortgage check to some old bank in Kennedyland. I assumed she meant Massachusetts.”

  “Sean, I’m confused,” I said. “Mrs. Klein and her husband built that house many years ago; He died more than twenty-five years ago. Why would there still be a mortgage? Wouldn’t it be paid off?”

  Sean nodded. “That’s a good question,” he said. “But I don’t have a good answer. I asked her the same thing when she said she still owed on it. She said something about her husband ‘forgetting’ to pay taxes when he sold his chain of movie theaters. This was back in the sixties or seventies, not sure when. Anyway, he had to take a second mortgage on the property to pay the IRS. I don’t know how much, but Mrs. Klein said the interest and penalty were more than the amount Joseph owed. It was none of my business then, so I didn’t push it.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Harley. “Can I smoke in here?” He swiveled in the chair and looked around the room. “When will I get my money?”

  “No,” said Sean in a tone that left no doubt that no meant no. “Harley, I have a couple of things on my plate right now. It’ll be a couple of days or so before I can get a handle on this. I’ll let you know.”

  With that, Sean moved the folder back to the side of his desk and asked if there were any other questions. I had about a zillion but knew this wasn’t the time to ask. Charles shook his head. And Harley was already out of his chair and had a pack of Camels in his hand. He headed to the door.

  “Oh, I forgot,” said Charles. We were in the waiting area saying bye to Marlene. “Sean, there is one other legal question I wanted to ask. Do you have another minute?”

  Charles asking a legal question was as rare as the American Heart Association endorsing Dunkin’ Donuts.

  “Uh, sure,” said Sean.

  Harley had heard enough legal mumbo-jumbo. “I’m out of here,” he growled and headed down the stairs.

  Charles was already walking to Sean’s office. “Chris, you can join us.”

  “Gee, thanks, Charles,” I mumbled under my breath.

  The three of us took our familiar seats in Sean’s office. Charles had closed the door once he had us herded together.

  Sean smiled. “Charles, a legal question?”

  Charles pointed his cane at Sean and glared. “Spill it. What’s going on?”

  Sean returned Charles’s glare, looked around the room, fiddled with a surfboard-shaped, orange paperweight, and moved some papers from one side of the desk to the other. I wondered how much longer he could stall before giving in to Charles’s cane-pointed question.

  “I don’t know Harley,” began Sean. “I didn’t want to say more while he was here.” He paused. “Hell, I don’t know much more than I said anyway.”

  Charles lowered his cane. “Sean,” he said, “The police didn’t call yesterday, get you all irritated, have you go wherever, meet with you, to tell you they didn’t know anything about your partner’s death.”

  “Routine questions, that’s all,” said Sean. He shuffled the paperweight from hand to hand. “They asked when I saw Tony last. If he seemed worried. If he had enemies. Did I know if he went out in the marsh often. If he and I had any disputes. If—”

  “Stomp on the brakes!” said Charles. His cane came up from his lap. “You’re a lawyer and you thought that last one was a routine question? Where did you go to law school—Sesame Street U?” Charles shook his head. “Did you and Tony have disputes?”

  Sean tapped his fingers on the desk. “They’re just reaching,” he said. “They don’t know what happened … I would have asked the same thing.”

  For someone who had repeatedly jumped out of planes, surfed, and scuba dived with sharks, Sean seemed mighty nervous.

  “Sean,” I said, “what’d you say to their questions?”

  “The truth, of course. I hadn’t seen Tony for two weeks before Memorial Day.”

  “Was that unusual?” asked Charles. “That’s a long time.”

  Good question, Charles, I thought. For law partners, two weeks did seem like a long period not to see each other.

  “Not really. We have a small office in North Charleston, and he works there most of the time. Tony had his own clients and took most of his meetings at their offices.”

  “Was he worried about anything?” asked Charles. “How about enemies?”

  Sean giggled and looked down at the paperweight. “He should have been worried … never mind. Enemies? He’s a lawyer—what do you think?”

  Marlene knocked on the door and stuck her head in before Sean said anything. “Sorry to interrupt. Want to take a call from Abe Fox?”

  Sean looked at Charles and then me, and back at Marlene and asked her to get a number and see if he could call him back in a few minutes.

  She closed the door, and Charles said, “Why should Tony have been worried?”

  I knew Sean’s “never mind” wouldn’t fly past the master inquisitor.

  Sean stood and walked to the wall behind Charles’s and my chairs. We turned and watched as he looked at a photo of a significantly younger Sean Aker free-floating in the air before his parachute deployed. Whoever took the photo had been no more than fifteen feet from Sean and captured a wide grin on his face. Fearless, I thought; until a few minutes ago.

  “I was here on Sunday evening about a month ago; a rare event, I admit. Tony’s light was on and on his desk the brown accordion file we keep our bank statements in.” He looked toward Tony’s office. “We have several accounts—each of us has an individual account; there’s a partnership one; and several escrow accounts. Marlene handles most of the checks, and I seldom get involved. Tony’s the detail person and finance guy, and he works with her on reconciling the statements every so often. I hate it.” He paused—too long for Charles’s comfort.

  “Was something wrong?” asked Charles.

  “Yeah,” said Sean. He had returned to his desk and had both elbows plopped squarely on the surface. “I’ll spare you the details; let’s just say the partnership account was nearly seventy-five grand light.”

  “As in seventy-five thousand dollars?” said Charles. “Vamoosed?”

  Sean raised the paperweight and sidearmed it against the wall to our right. Charles was closest to the point of impact. He ducked and nearly slid out of his chair. The paperweight missed a framed photo of Sean scuba diving but sounded like a gunshot when it hit the wall. It hit the floor with a clink.

  “That mean yes?” said Charles after he had regained his balance on the chair.

  Sean simply stared at my friend.

  “Did you tell all this to the police?” I asked.

  “Yep.”

  “What’d they say?” asked Charles.

  “They’d be talking to me again.”

  I’d put money on that, I thought.

  Sean shed little additional light on the missing money and said he had to make a call—a polite dismissal. Vacation season had begun, and we had to weave among the visitors to make the short trek from the law office to the gallery. The number of vacationers thinned considerably as we reached the door to Landrum Gallery; unfortunately, not that unusual an occurrence. It was still before noon, but the temperature pushed the upper eighties; the air conditioned gallery would feel great.

  “Do you know who Abe Fox is?” asked Charles as I unlocked the door.

  “One of the top criminal attorneys
in the state, if his press clippings are accurate,” I said. I got a dollop of satisfaction knowing the answer to Charles’s question; he gets way too much enjoyment telling me things I don’t know.

  Charles grabbed two Diet Pepsis from the refrigerator in the back room, underhanded one to me, and frowned; he had missed his teaching moment. “And do you think it was just a coincidence that one of the top criminal attorneys called Sean?”

  “Could have been.” I pulled the tab on the drink and sat in one of the rickety chairs at the multi-purpose table. “He may want to buy property here and wants Sean to handle the paperwork; they may have a client in common; he could be calling to get Sean to buy tickets to a big charity event the legal association is sponsoring; he—”

  “He could be Sean’s long-lost father wanting to tell him his son that his mother was from the planet Uranus!” interrupted Charles. “Stop being so dense. Sean’s hiring Fox to defend him. Defend him against a charge of murdering his partner.”

  I had known where Charles was headed when he asked if I knew Fox. I wanted to slow down his conclusion-train. “How long have you known Sean?”

  “A dozen years or so,” he said. “I met him just after he opened his practice. Why?”

  I ignored his question. “So, how well do you think you know him?”

  “Fairly well, I guess. We were in the skydiving club together for a couple of years—you get to know someone pretty well when you’re sitting in that little plane getting ready to step out into nothing. He and his wife live over at Mariner’s Cay; we don’t do any socializing together, if that’s what you mean.”

  Mariner’s Cay was a large condo development across the Folly River from the island.

  “Have you ever seen anything that would make you think he could be a killer?” I asked.

  Charles leaned back in his chair and rubbed his chin. “Not really,” he said. “But I’ve never seen him deal with someone who ripped him off for seventy-five thousand bucks.” Charles paused and then nodded his head. “When that paperweight whizzed by, it entered my mind that he might have a temper.”

  “Jumped right on that, didn’t you?” I smiled. “We really don’t know, do we?”

  “No, but I don’t want to think Sean’s a killer. Besides, we don’t know that Tony was murdered. He could’ve drowned, had a heart attack, or been grabbed by a sea monster, or, or …”

  “Now you’re being dense. What are the odds that he wasn’t murdered?”

  “Give or take, zero.”

  The bell over the front door interrupted our mathematical probability discussion, and Charles jumped up to greet a potential customer. I jumped up at a much slower speed and got another Pepsi from the fridge. I didn’t know Sean as well as Charles did but still couldn’t picture him as a killer. He had handled some of the legal work for the gallery, had even helped me get information to help find a murderer a couple of years back. And last year, during one of my lowest moments in memory, Sean had sprung Charles and me from jail. On a non-professional level, we had had several conversations at social events and even shared a conversation over an alcoholic beverage at The Crab Shack, one of a handful of Folly’s outdoor restaurants. I also realized that none of this would preclude him from killing his partner.

  “I’ve got it. Brilliant!” said Charles as he bounded back into the room. “Wait till you hear this,” he said.

  I ignored his enthusiasm and asked if he had sold anything.

  He nodded his head in the direction of the gallery. “Idiots,” he responded. “Wouldn’t know a great photo if it bit them on the big toe.”

  It didn’t make a bit of sense, but I figured it meant they had left without buying anything.

  “Forget them,” he continued. “Wait until you hear this.” He headed to the fridge and grabbed a Bud Light.

  Oh, oh, I thought.

  “Okay, here goes.” Charles had returned to the table. “Now that I’m unemployed, I can devote my work hours to another pursuit. Now that I’m heir to a fortune, I can devote my resources to my new business. And because I’m such a generous, helpful individual, I can offer you a job in my new business.” He paused and squinted his eyes in my direction. “I can do that even after you fired me.”

  “First,” I said and made a fist of my right hand and extended my thumb, “you were never employed, so your status is unchanged. Second,” I raised my index finger, “you have no idea what you inherited; remember, Sean said you may owe more than you get.” I extended my middle finger. “And third, when the gallery closes, I will go back to being retired, full-time—never to go to work again—retired.”

  “You haven’t even asked what the business is,” he said.

  “I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know, but tell me anyway … like I could stop you.”

  “FDA—the Fowler Detective Agency.”

  Since I moved to Folly Beach and had the “honor” of meeting Charles Fowler, he and I had developed the knack of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had stumbled on a murder of a prominent developer; another friend of mine had convinced us that an apparent suicide was actually a murder; someone had killed innocent people to serve as an overture for murdering our friend Larry; and a crazed crossbow killer had bumped off some of our friends and acquaintances.

  Through some minor detecting, stumbling into places where we had no business, and pure luck, we had helped the police find the killers. Each time, we found ourselves in places where the police should have been, and Charles had created an imaginary detective agency. He called it the C & C Detective Agency. Depending upon his mood, the first C was for Charles or for Chris. I called it absurd, impossible, dangerous, and totally a figment of his imagination.

  Now it seemed he wanted to move it to the possible category, and in a glimmer of poetic justice, according to its new moniker, it would appear that I had been fired.

  “I think FDA is taken,” I said. “Unless you are going to be investigating norovirus illnesses linked to oysters, you better not steal the US Food and Drug Administration’s initials.”

  “Good point,” he said without any hesitation. “They would see me as a threat. Wouldn’t want them to have to change their name. How about CDA, Charles’s Detective Agency?”

  “Do you know what it takes to start a detective agency?” I asked. “I would hope not anyone can hang out a shingle and claim to be a private detective.”

  “Why not? Anyone can open a restaurant. Look at those places that serve seriously sucky food; they’re not restaurants, but their signs say they are.”

  Arguing with Charles was like trying to teach a turtle how to ride a bike; it’ll look at you, bob its head, and then nothing.

  Charles looked at me and then nodded. A bit turtle-like, I thought. “I’ve already got my first case,” he said.

  “Finding Tony’s killer?”

  “Yep.”

  Brian Newman was Folly Beach’s director of public safety, shortened to “police chief” by most everyone. He and I had slowly become friends. I, along with a few quirky friends, had stumbled in his way a few times; we had provided him with invaluable leads on a couple of cases and given him more than one headache; and once, he had had to save my life.

  The chief had suffered a serious heart attack in September—so serious that the doctors had thought he was a goner. But Brian was a fighter. He was in his mid-sixties but was in excellent health at the time of the attack. His overall health saved him, according to his doctors.

  Brian was a week away from returning to full-time duty the first of the year, when he suffered another attack. It wasn’t as serious as the first, but the doctors “highly encouraged” him to retire from the force and cite pressure, stress, and fighting battles for funding from the city council—all things he didn’t need more of. The doctors didn’t know Brian. He had served thirty years in the military,
in Special Services and as an MP; he had been Folly’s chief for nearly fifteen years. He wasn’t near ready to quit.

  After much wrangling and a direct order from the mayor, Brian agreed to “rest” until the fall, when he would resume his duties part-time until he could con his doctor into releasing him for full duty. He was as happy about “resting” as I would be about an outbreak of shingles on my back.

  A low front pushed into the area overnight and helped lower the near-record high, late-spring temperatures. A steady rain replaced the sweltering heat, and I decided it would be the perfect day to visit the “resting” chief. I told Charles my plan, and he asked if he could tag along. He would normally chide me for leaving the gallery during the busy season and then give me his martyr’s grin and say to go ahead, he would mind the store. Not today—he was up to something.

  Brian lived in a three-story condo complex across Folly Road from the Piggly Wiggly. The rain had intensified as we pulled into the development. The large, relatively new, attractive complex was nicer than most condos in the area and was convenient to both the island and downtown Charleston.

  Visitor’s parking was across the drive from the building. Brian lived on the second floor, and we were drenched by the time we ran from the car up the stairs. My Tilley protected my receding hairline, but my golf shirt and shorts weren’t so lucky; they were soaked. Charles had had me stop by his apartment on the way so he could change into a NYPD long-sleeved T-shirt in honor of our visit to Folly’s highest ranking law enforcement official. The wet, black T-shirt stuck to his thin frame.

  Brian greeted his waterlogged visitors with a smile and waved us in. Despite the precautions dictated by his doctor, he looked fine. His six-foot-two frame stood erect. He was still slightly under his fighting weight, but his face was tanned; he had lost the pasty-white pallor I had become accustomed to seeing since his first attack. He was dressed in bright, glow-in-the-dark-blue shorts, a short-sleeved Folly Beach T-shirt, and chocolate-brown Crocs; however reluctant, he had clearly become acclimated to the life of leisure. I didn’t want to drip on the floor, but Brian said not to worry. The combination living room and kitchen had a tan, ceramic tile floor, so the drips wouldn’t hurt it. He offered us coffee and headed to the high-tech-looking, Bunn coffeemaker before we could decline.