Dead Man Below Deck

Chapter 17. The Pieces Fit Together

Betty had gone over to her cousin’s place for sympathy while I loafed on the deck all day. She correctly figured that she would get more emotional support from her cousin than she would get from me.

When Betty got home, she told me, “I called my cousin Andrew and told him about the fire. He invited you out for a beer tonight. He said Salamonie’s at six. I figured you would want to go, so I told him you would meet him there. If you don’t feel like it, I can call him back and tell him.”

“Sounds like a great idea,” I said. “I want to run some ideas past him. Maybe we can figure out what’s going on around here.” 

By this time the water was back on, so I showered and changed clothes. Then I headed out on foot. The patrolman out front stopped me. “Where are you going, sir?” he asked.

“Just over to Salamonie’s for a beer with a friend.”

This clearly created a dilemma for him.

“Why don’t you stay here?” I suggested. “Betty is upstairs.”

“I don’t think you should go out, sir.” He was not liking my plans.

“Don’t worry. It’s only a ten minute walk. If you give me a phone number, I can call you when I get there.”

He agreed to that plan, though reluctantly.

The best way to walk to Sal’s was to go straight over on Commonwealth, turn left on a side street, then cut through the back parking lot of the Citgo station. That brought you out only a block from the restaurant. I called the patrolman when I was in front of Sal’s to tell him the coast was clear.

When I walked in the door, Andrew was already sitting in the bar. “Hey, Andrew. How’s it goin’?” I asked.

“Better for me than for you, I bet.”

“That’s a sucker bet. But I’m sure glad you suggested this. I want to go over the whole story with you and see if you can figure out what’s going on.”

We ordered Millers because this clearly was going to be thirsty work.

“Okay,” I said, “first we find a dead body under the deck. That’s Saturday morning. A secret service agent tells me the body had been there since Thursday, so I’m in the clear. But the agent also tells me a militia group called the Fist of God wants to assassinate the Democratic presidential candidate, John Kerry. Supposedly, this group is in Fort Atkinson. He tells me that a real estate developer is tied in with the Fist of God crowd. He might even be their financier. The theory is that business types don’t want Kerry elected because he would be bad for business. So they manipulate this militia group into knocking him off. The militia does not like Kerry because they think he is a Godless communist or something. Are you with me so far?”

Andrew nodded. “Sure. I get it. It’s pretty farfetched, but I can follow the argument.

“Okay, let’s see. I guess the next thing that happened was that somebody snuck a hundred thousand bucks into my checking account.”

“Wait a minute. I haven’t heard about this part. A hundred grand? Who did you have to kill for that?”

“Terrible choice of words, Andrew. My secret service agent turned up dead and the cops originally thought that I killed him for the hundred K. But later they decided it was a set up. I was being framed for the murder. But since 100K is a lot of money, the cops figured that the murder had nothing to do with politics. Instead, it must be connected to drug dealers somehow.”

“Ah hah!” Andrew said. “I knew it.”

“Yes, you did know it. You said drugs were probably tied in with the first murder. And you must have said it a little too loudly at the concert in the park last Monday. The drug dealers probably overhead you say it. That’s the only reason the cops and I can come up with for why some guys would first try to frame me then try to kill me. The dealers thought I was getting too close. Now I’m a witness who might be able to help identify them and they really don’t like that.”

“Wait a minute,” Andrew said. “Why would they think you were a threat to them before you could identify them? This doesn’t hang together right.”

“That part is a little murky. And here are some more murky parts. Who was the first dead guy and why was he killed? Why was he left under my deck? Why was the secret service agent telling me some malarkey about militia if he was really after drug dealers? And if he really was after drug dealers, why did he want me to check out the real estate developer? And here is the latest bit of murk. Who set fire to our building and why did the real estate guy turn up in the ashes burnt to a crisp?”

Andrew just shook his head. “We’ve got too many players in this game,” he said. “There are too many theories about what is going on. Militia, real estate, and drug dealers can’t all be involved. It’s too much.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you another theory. This one is from my neighbor Skip Cavanaugh. Skip said that maybe the local anti-development crowd is against real estate projects and they stashed a body next to my building to throw off sales. This would cause the real estate guys to go bankrupt and development would stop.”

Andrew frowned. “That won’t hold up,” he said. “Nobody is radical enough around here to commit murder to stop economic development. We might not like development, but we wouldn’t kill to stop it.”

“Okay, then you tell me how it all ties together.”

Andrew gave it his best shot. “Try this. We can work backwards from today and see if we can determine what might have caused each event. First, we have the real estate guy fried in his own building. If I knew nothing else about the situation, I would guess that he was setting the fire and got caught in it. He screwed up big time.”

This made sense to me. “You mean he was in danger of going bankrupt because the units weren’t selling, so he needed to clear out the inventory. And the insurance money would help to settle his debts.”

Andrew nodded. “Sure. It happens all the time.”

He considered how to explain the rest of it. “That brings us to the biker attack. It does appear to be an escalation of a campaign against you. The frame-up didn’t work, so they had to take drastic action. The question is why were you dangerous to them? You didn’t really know anything about them before they attacked you. What were you doing that they would regard as a threat?”

“All I was doing was hanging around with the real estate guy to find out if he was connected to the militia.”

“That must be it,” Andrew said. “They didn’t know why you were hanging around with the developer, but they could see you were doing it. If that was threatening to them, then they were connected to the developer somehow. You might learn what that connection was if you kept on.”

“Keep going. You’re doing fine. What could the connection have been between the drug dealers and the business guy?”

Andrew was on a roll. “Money, of course. The problem with drug dealing on a large scale is that you end up with a lot of cash that you can’t explain. So you need to launder it by running it through legitimate businesses. The developer needed cash and the drug dealers needed a place to unload their cash. It was perfect for both of them.”

Now it all made sense. I started running with Andrew’s theory. “They killed the secret service agent because they could see he was investigating something and, having guilty consciences, they figured he had to be after them. So they took him out.”

Andrew jumped in again. “The first dead guy was probably another cop who got too close. Same story. Kill him before he can figure out what’s going on. Leaving the body under your deck and the wallet in your trash was just a matter of convenience. You were a convenient patsy.”

I finished it. “And my developer friend was still losing money. Only now he didn’t just owe it to the banks. He owed it to a very nasty crowd of drug dealers. He was desperate to raise enough cash to settle up with them, so he tried the arson thing. He was no good at it and died in the attempt.”

Poor Jorgenson. He just wanted out from under debt. I bet if he had pulled it off he would have retired and become a greeter at Walmart. And been grateful he got off easy. He just got in too deep, chasing the businessman’s dream of a big profit.

Andrew had figured it out. We ordered another round on me. I toasted him for his brilliance. Then we called it a night.

As I walked out the door, I wondered:  What did the Fist of God have to do with all this?