Of course, all hell broke loose. We called Mrs. Trueblood, and wearing jeans and a Bon Jovi T-shirt, she came stomping down before the cops arrived, shaking her head, and muttering something about how “everybody in the damned world is now going to know about that damned gold.”
It didn’t seem to bother her that one of her former employees lay dead on our floor.
Some guy in a blue denim work shirt with thirty keys dangling from his belt came running in, assaying the damages. He quietly gazed at the body still oozing blood, went into the bathroom, loudly threw up, then walked out, nodding at us as if he’d taken care of things.
A young blonde lady with an official name tag pinned on her blouse stuck her head in, saw the commotion, and slowly backed out muttering, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”
The four of us walked out onto the concrete walkway, waiting for the Monroe County Sheriff Department to arrive. I looked right out into the parking lot and could actually see some of the highway from there.
“Are you all right?” I noticed Maria hadn’t said a thing and I figured I should check in with her.
“No.”
I put my hand on her shoulder and she pushed it off.
“How did I get mixed up in something like this?” She walked to the railing and stared down at the broken-shell parking lot.
“You agreed to help us. I’ve got to be honest with you, this happens to people who hang around with us.”
She actually smiled, then gave me a little laugh. The problem was, I was dead serious. Dead serious.
I saw the white car with green-and-black lettering pull in with its rooftop lights flashing as if they were going to pull someone over for speeding. The lettering on the side of the vehicle said it all.
SERVING THE FLORIDA KEYS
KEY LARGO TO KEY WEST
So these guys patrolled a one-hundred-mile stretch of highway, dealing with everything from speeders and drunks to, well, possible murder. Two officers stepped out of the car, looked up at us, and I waved. Lights on the car still flashing, they walked to the elevator. I should have told them it was slow. Really slow. Almost two minutes later they exited, a one-floor ride.
The red-and-white rescue unit pulled up thirty seconds later, preceded by its screaming siren. And then there was the second sheriff car, and a third, and the officers separated us while two men walked into our room and immediately put crime tape over the open doorway.
I don’t know what all went on in that room, but cars kept coming and men and women were going in and out, lifting the yellow crime tape, then putting it back, and we were all herded downstairs where the police cleared the pool area. A mother and father with three small children were not very happy.
At the bar I saw Bobbie frowning at me as she slammed drinks down as fast as possible. Every seat was taken and the buzz was intense. Young people in bathing suits, older people with shorts and colorful shirts. There were two European couples, the corpulent girls in string bikinis and the two guys in what appeared to be colored jock straps. The assembled crowd watched us, pointed to the balcony above, and seemed to devour the excitement that only a gruesome murder can deliver.
The sheriff’s deputies questioned us individually. We were spread out at the four corners of the fenced-in pool, and we each had our own officer. It was almost comical the way they handled it, but I suppose they couldn’t rule us out as suspects. It did happen in our room, but we hadn’t even been there.
“Mr. Moore, you were the one who found the body, right?”
“No. My roommate found the body.”
“Mr. Lessor?”
“Yes.”
“Were you with your roommate, Mr. Lessor, before he found the body?”
“I was with him maybe five minutes before.”
“So he went to the room and five minutes later, he calls you and,” he glanced at a paper in his hand, “a Miss Maria Sanko to come up and see the body?”
“I don’t have a stopwatch. My guess is that-”
“Five minutes.”
“I guess. I’m not a good judge of time, but-”
“So Mr. Lessor had at least five minutes by himself?”
It sounded for all the world like the first thing this guy wanted to do was accuse my partner. So I obviously thought the quickest solution to the problem was to start defending James.
“Mr. Lessor,”-I’d never called him mister in my life-“did not kill anyone. He was shocked. He didn’t even know this guy.”
And this deputy didn’t know James. James hated cops. As an accountant, his father had been arrested in their home for failing to pay withholding taxes from the company he worked for. Strict orders from the company’s owner. But it was James’s father who did the time.
Cops stormed into their home and cuffed his father in front of the family. His father was locked up and spent years in prison. James said they emasculated him. James hated cops.
The officer glanced back at where they were interviewing James. The look in his eyes told me there was going to be trouble.
“Just a moment.”
He walked back to the far corner of the pool, conferred with that officer for a moment, then came back.
“Mr. Lessor did not know the victim, is that correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“Isn’t it true that the victim was a private detective?”
How he’d already arrived at that conclusion I didn’t know. Unless James had already told them.
“I don’t know that for sure. I mean, we saw their pictures online and-” Online. Wrong word to use.
“And why were you looking them up online?” The line delivered like a B-movie actor. Intimidating. Threatening. “If you didn’t know the victim, why were you searching for him online?”
“They were-”
“They? Was someone else killed too?”
I sensed it was not going well. This thing with James and a dead Weezle was a little more complicated than I’d imagined. And maybe Mary Trueblood was right. Now everyone was going to know about the gold. I was just worried about James.
“Mr. Moore, again I’m asking you, why were you and Mr. Lessor looking up the victim online? You claim neither you nor Mr. Lessor knew him.”
And so it went. Everything pointed to James searching for the guy online and then finding the body. And the insinuation was that if James had five minutes before he called us up, he had time to kill the guy who broke in.
I know James. I’ve known him since we were in grade school. He’s my best friend, and while he may be a good talker, he’s not a fighter. He’s terrible at confrontation. James couldn’t kill anyone. And why would he? These guys, Weezle and Markim? We’d never heard about them until this morning.
I figured Maria was getting the same questions, and James was probably being grilled about what he did for those five minutes, bristling every second of the interview.
And Mary Trueblood, she was probably telling these officers that we were there to find forty-some million dollars worth of gold. At this moment I wished I’d listened to my inner voice back in Carol City. I should have put my foot down and said no. Anytime James thinks something is a good idea, it isn’t.
“You can’t account for those five minutes that Mr. Lessor was gone, correct?”
I must have told the cop at least five times that I could account for those five minutes. “The elevators here are very slow. Very slow.”