Survival Is a Dying Art Page 9

  He agreed. “Now, how about a dip in the pool? You brought your suit, didn’t you?” He grinned. “Though of course I won’t complain if you didn’t.”

  I pulled it out of my messenger bag. “Right here. Somewhere I can change?”

  “There’s a bathroom right across the hall. I’ll see you out at the pool when you’re ready.”

  I went into the bathroom, which was as large as my kitchen, lined with marble and mirrors, and I stripped down, folding my clothes carefully and leaving them on the bathroom counter.

  Then I couldn’t resist pulling a couple of poses in the mirrors. My dick was stiff and stuck straight out of my reddish pubes. My ass was tight, my biceps nothing like Lester’s but still in good shape.

  I pulled on the bathing trunks and thought for a moment about Jesse Venable’s body. That wilted my erection enough that I could walk out comfortably.

  Through the sliding glass doors, I saw Venable on a lounge chair. He was shirtless, in a pair of oversized board shorts in an electric plaid. I walked out and a wave of hot, humid air hit me. Without evening thinking about it, I went to the deep end of the pool and dove in.

  The water was tepid but still felt cool and refreshing. I surfaced and shook the water from my hair, then wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. “If I had a pool like this I’d swim every morning,” I said.

  “And once upon a time, I did,” he said. “Now the best I can do is wallow around the shallow end like a hippo.”

  It was hard to know how to answer that, so I went back under the water and swam a couple of laps, thinking as I did of the refugees on the capsized boat in the Aegean Sea. They didn’t have the luxury I did, of swimming for pleasure.

  When I finished I climbed up the stairs at the shallow end, the water cascading from my body, my suit glued to me like a second skin. What would I be willing to do to live like this? Become some rich guy’s kept boy? Tweak a few laws or accounting rules to make my own fortune?

  Sadly, I couldn’t see myself doing any of those things. So instead I walked over to where Venable lay, took a towel he offered, and then relaxed on the lounger beside him, feeling the sun bake my pale skin.

  His cell phone rang, and he went inside to answer it. I took a bottle of cold water from a cooler and drank, then turned over on my back. Through the glass doors I could see Venable arguing with someone on the phone. Then he disappeared into another part of the house.

  I wasn’t sure how long I was expected to stick around. I’d gotten my assignment, taken a swim, let Venable ogle me for a while. As I saw him coming back through the living room, I sat up.

  He opened the sliding door but didn’t step out. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to say goodbye,” he said. “I have to get over to my downtown operation to handle something.” He motioned to the side of the pool. “There’s a shower over there if you want to rinse off the chlorine. I’ll be in the office when you’re dressed again.”

  He turned and went back inside, closing the door behind him. I got up and looked at the shower. What the hell, he was gone, and I didn’t want to go home with chlorine in my pubes. I dropped my suit and stepped under the shower, rinsing myself well. If Venable was watching from somewhere in the house, so be it.

  Did I feel guilty about using my body to hook Venable? Had Larry Kane acted the same way? Look where it had gotten him. So no, I didn’t feel a bit of guilt about establishing a friendship with Venable however I could. Not when there was so much at stake, for innocent victims of smuggled goods and for immigrants left to die in the wine-dark sea of the Aegean.

  I grabbed a fresh towel from a pile by the loungers, dried myself off and then wrapped it around my waist. Then I padded through the living room to the bathroom and dressed.

  I found Venable in his office. He had returned to the outfit he was wearing when I arrived. He was on the phone again, and he motioned toward the pile of paperwork I had to take with me.

  I grabbed it and slid it into my messenger bag. Then I put my hand up to my ear, my thumb out, in the universal “I’ll call you,” gesture.

  He waved goodbye, and I walked out. Step one accomplished.

  13 – Sex in the Bushes

  It was late afternoon by then, so I drove home and settled in with Jesse Venable’s accounting data. I was curious to see if I could find anything there that would tie to watch smuggling or any other information Larry Kane might have had access to.

  It took me a while to remember what information to look for on the time sheets and get my spreadsheet set up, and then it was slow, dull work entering the data from the paper sheets for the manager and eight part-time employees at the pawn shop. I couldn’t find anything irregular, which was frustrating. Was this going to be a big waste of time?

  By six o’clock I was brain-dead and ready for a drink so I drove over to Lazy Dick’s to get a beer. With a Magic City Pale Ale in my hand, I circled once around the dance floor, then walked out to the patio. I spotted Tom Laughlin drinking a martini and watching a bunch of twinks in tight shirts and equally tight pants cavort on the dance floor to Calvin Harris and Rihanna telling the boys what they came for.

  I was glad to see him because I had a few more questions for him about Frank Sena, and I was curious to see how their relationship was developing. I slid into the table across from him and asked, “Enjoying the view?”

  “Of course. You should get out there and dance yourself.”

  “I’m danced out at present,” I said. “Did some country and western line dancing the other night at a bar in Tamarac. But as long I ran into you I wanted to ask you about Frank Sena. You think all he wants is to get this painting?”

  “You have to understand something, Angus,” Tom said. “Men of my generation were denied so much. Most of us didn’t have the chance to be open at work. We couldn’t dream of getting married, of having children. We tend to be greedy now—when we see something we want, we’re determined not to deny ourselves any longer.”

  I gave him a capsule version of what I’d learned about the painting, and he stopped me at the phrase darsi alla macchia. “Say that again,” he said.

  I did. “It means to hide in the bushes,” I said. “A derogatory way of saying that the Macchiaioli worked outdoors.”

  “Probably not all they were doing out there,” Tom said, and he smirked. “Back in the day, you know, it was hard to find somewhere private to hook up with another man. So we went outdoors. The Back Bay Fens in Boston, the Ramble in New York’s Central Park.”

  I remembered my own encounter with outdoor sex, back when I was an undergrad at Penn State and had gone out hiking in the woods with a friend from the Rainbow Roundtable. It was a hot summer afternoon, and when we found a small secluded lake, we’d shucked our clothes and then.... Well, it was a great memory. For men of Tom’s generation, it must have been less fun because it was their only option.

  Though I couldn’t see that being part of a museum description of the painting, it was yet another reason why the painting was an important part of gay culture and history, and needed to be somewhere people could see it and learn from it. That is, if I could get it back from Italy for Frank while I was trying to rope in Jesse Venable on smuggling charges, and at the same time gather evidence that could save immigrants from death on the sea.

  After a solid night’s sleep, I went for a morning run, then packed up all Venable’s data to take to the office in Miramar with me. I paged through the remaining documents and when I found a time sheet for Larry Kane, I began with him.

  He didn’t have a supervisor to sign off for him, so I assumed that meant Venable trusted him to show up and leave on time. He worked a regular shift at the flea market, Thursday through Sunday from 9:30 AM to 6:00 PM. But he also worked at various times during the other three days of the week. Some days he noted that he had driven to the airport in Miami, while on others he’d write something like “deliver carton to” followed by a street address.

  I could understand going to the airport, if t
hat’s where the goods came in. But why make those deliveries? In addition to selling at Trader Tom’s, was Venable acting as a wholesaler for counterfeit goods, handing them off to other retailers?

  The addresses on the time sheet weren’t very helpful. In a couple of cases Larry had only listed a house and street number, and when I checked online that data could map to several different cities in Miami-Dade and Broward counties. A couple also showed up as multi-unit buildings, and without additional information I couldn’t tell who he’d been visiting.

  I tried everything I could – Google searches, cross-referencing in our own databases, but I couldn’t find anything unusual. Maybe he was just delivering belts and wallets to good customers. Only one came up clearly as a business – an art gallery on a side street in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Was Larry picking up items that Jesse had purchased? Or returning art work? Did he know too much about Venable’s operations, which had led to his death?

  I walked down to Vito’s office to brainstorm with him. “Yesterday I met with Venable at his house and agreed to do some accounting work for him. I’ve gone through the time sheets for the employees at his various businesses and there’s no other booth employee besides Larry Kane in the paperwork that Venable gave me.”

  “The flea market’s open today. Go back there and see what the other vendors say,” Vito said. “If there’s someone else running the booth. Maybe Venable himself.”

  I couldn’t see Venable leveraging his prodigious bulk behind that booth—he seemed like the kind of guy who’d keep it closed until he could find someone else to work there, but I agreed to head over and check.

  Vito sat back in his chair. “You used that false ID to get in with Venable? He didn’t have any suspicions?”

  “Not that he mentioned to me.”

  “Anything else unusual in what you found?”

  “Not so far. I still have a lot of data to go through.”

  “Keep an eye out for anything regarding smuggled coins through that pawn shop or the gold buyer,” he said. “Any unusual prices paid, anything like that.”

  “You still investigating that theft from the Atocha?” I asked.

  “I don’t let go of my cases until I close them,” Vito said.

  “Right now all I have are time sheets. But if I keep working for Venable maybe I can get access to more data.”

  I went back to my office and spent the next couple of hours entering data for Golden Ticket employees. I had grossly underestimated how much time it would take me to compile all the data, and I was glad that I didn’t need whatever I could collect from Venable to pay my bills.

  Trader Tom’s was open on Thursdays until six in the evening, so I drove up there from Miramar and retraced my steps to Venable’s booth. It was closed, and when I chatted with the neighboring vendors they told me it had been shuttered since Kane left on Saturday.

  I managed to work my way around to the incident the previous weekend where the booth owner had been knocked out, and asked if there’d been any similar incidents at Venable’s booth. “People always complain,” one woman told me.

  She leaned in close. “I didn’t trust that boy Larry. Every so often I’d notice him putting cash in his pocket instead of into the register.”

  “You ever say anything to the guy who owns the booth?”

  “Never saw him. I figured if he was stupid enough to trust the kid, it was his own fault.”

  Was that what had gotten Larry Kane murdered? Dipping into Venable’s cash flow?

  14 – Dirty Job

  As I was driving to work the next morning I got a text from Vito, summoning me to his office as soon as I got in.

  “New developments in the immigrant smuggling case,” he said. “The Turkish police intercepted a truck on the road from Istanbul to the coast filled with Syrian refugees and a couple of cases of counterfeit watches.”

  “Were the watches intended for Jesse Venable?”

  “No one is talking, and we can’t figure out who the go-between is who could connect the watches to Venable. If we can’t do that, then our investigation is dead in the water. No pun intended.”

  “What can I do to help?”

  “Keep pushing Venable. You’ve got to get something on him so we can pressure him to give up his contacts in Turkey. Then the powers that be will can try to shut down these operations.”

  “I’ve been reading up on immigrant smuggling,” I said. “Honestly? If we shut down one operation, another one pops up, doesn’t it?”

  “You could use that argument on any operation we bust,” Vito said. “Look, I sympathize with these people. My grandparents were immigrants to this country, and if they hadn’t risked their lives I wouldn’t be here today. But there are laws in place to govern immigration, and it’s our job to enforce them.”

  “I know that this is my job, and I don’t get to pick and choose which laws we want to enforce. But what if we don’t believe in one of them?”

  “That’s a question way above my pay grade,” Vito said. “It’s our job to take the micro view, not the macro. You and I can’t solve the world’s problems, but we can help take down people doing bad things. Capisce?”

  I nodded. “I get it. Focus on the individuals, like Jesse Venable.” I hesitated for a moment, then added, “Agent Gordieva told me that the purpose of going undercover is to get someone to trust you, then to betray that trust.”

  “You’re thinking deep this morning, Angus. You want me to pull you from this investigation? I’d hate to do it because you’re making good progress, but if you’re uncomfortable, I can switch you back to the college information detail.”

  Not that. I’d spent a month after getting shot going around to local colleges, showing them a video and talking about how students and faculty could be victimized by foreign governments. It was a poorly organized operation and I’d felt like I was being punished by being sent there, even though it was reasonable to put me on a low-stress detail while I was recovering from my injuries.

  “No, I’m good,” I said. “These kinds of doubts are valid, right? Shows that we’re paying attention to what we do and why it matters.”

  “You got it. Did you get to the flea market yesterday?”

  “I did. Venable’s booth was closed and I talked to a bunch of the other vendors, but I didn’t get much.”

  ”When do you see Venable next?”

  “Tomorrow. I’m delivering the spreadsheets I created for him.”

  “See if you can get him to talk about his business. Maybe he’ll be willing to brag about how smart he is. And what’s the scoop with this painting?”

  “He says he’s acting as an intermediary for my friend. He’s going to get some better quality photos and if they look good, we’ll move forward with the deal.”

  “If your friend is the legitimate owner, then it’s hard to make a case that Venable is dealing with a stolen work of art,” Vito said. “I’m tempted to tell you to forget about it, but the longer you stay in touch with Venable to more chance you’ll have to find something we can make stick.”

  As I walked back to my office, I was depressed. Venable was too slippery. Once he admitted that he knew the painting was stolen, and focusing on getting it back to its rightful owner, I’d lost the ability to use the connection against him. I’d only been able to come up with the most tenuous connection between him and fake watches smuggled from Turkey, and the only person who could have strengthened that tie, Larry Kane, was dead.

  Lester had flown to Pennsylvania for the weekend, to tour a single-batch whiskey distillery and go out on bar visits with the regional rep up there. After the week I’d had, I didn’t feel like going out, so I went home after work, where I spent some more time staring at the data I’d collected and got nowhere.

  Saturday morning Jonas and I went for a long run, and I showered, then spent another couple of hours making sure everything was complete with the work I’d promised Venable. Early in the afternoon I drove out to Weston. I had to drop of
f the paperwork, and at Vito’s direction, I had to keep playing the man until I found something we could use against him.

  It was yet another sunny day, and I shivered as I thought about the dark dealings that had bought Venable this expensive house. He met me at his front door, dressed in what I took to be his usual attire, the black top and track suit bottoms. “You’re a breath of fresh air,” he said, as I walked in. “I’ve been stuck in my office all morning. Let’s go out to the pool.”

  I agreed, but before I could move forward, he said, “Can I ask you a favor, Angus?”

  Crap. Was this where he was going to ask me to blow him—or let him blow me? I hadn’t even had the chance to get friendly with him. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to have sex with him. That was one of those very basic Bureau taboos that had been hammered into us at the Academy, and I valued my career way too much to take the chance.

  “You can ask.”

  “Would you mind getting into your bathing suit before we go out there?”

  “It’s not exactly the way I do accounting work,” I said.

  “I know. But...” He hesitated. “I’d really appreciate it.”

  What the hell. I was going to get into the suit eventually so I could go in the pool. Why not sooner rather than later? And my goal was to get close to him, get him to trust me, so that I could betray him.

  I agreed, and he smiled broadly. “Terrific. I’ll meet you out there.”

  He went down the hall toward his bedroom, and I went into the guest bath to change. This time I didn’t bother posing for the mirrors. I worried about how Venable would show up poolside—naked? What would I do? It wasn’t a question I’d gone over specifically with Katya, but from what she’d told me about her Russian sting operation I had the feeling she’d stretched the boundaries herself.

  It was a great relief to see Venable in another huge pair of neon bathing trunks. I carried my laptop out and set it up on a table in the shade. He joined me there, and I showed him the work I’d completed. “This is terrific,” he said. He handed me a letter-sized envelope, and I looked inside to see a bunch of small bills, singles, fives, and tens, with the occasional twenty. “You can count it if you want, but it’s what we agreed on.”