Same Old Sun, Same Old Moon

By Gaylord Dold

Elaine Jorgenson is a wealthy Key West real estate developer whose second husband is gambler Kevin Terminadi. When Jorgenson wants to bring a gambling casino to a popular Key West beach front property, citizens unite against it. Jack Kilgore, an ex-Marine Intelligence officer is hired to protect Jorgenson against threats from an environmental group. Nonetheless, Jorgenson is killed in a car bombing and Kilgore must find the killer or killers A single clue leads Kilgore first to Las Vegas where he encounters Moe Koffer, a sleazy private detective with connections to gambling and boxing interests. Kilgore must work against shadowy underworld figures to get justice.

Gaylord Dold lived in south Florida and has fished the Florida Bay. He's also the author of guides to the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic, as well as the general Caribbean area.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gaylord Dold
• Release date: Jun 4, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310051265

Gaylord Dold

Gaylord Dold is the author of fifteen works of fiction including the highly acclaimed private detective series featuring Mitch Roberts, a well as numerous contemporary crime thrillers. Many of his novels have been singled out for awards and praise by a number of critics and writer’s organizations. As one of the founders of Watermark Press, Dold edited and published a number of distinguished literary works, including the novel Leaving Las Vegas by John O’Brien, which was made into a movie starring Nicholas Cage and Elizabeth Shue. Dold lives on the prairie of southern Kansas.

Book preview

SAME OLD SUN,

SAME OLD MOON

Gaylord Dold

Premier Digital Publishing - Los Angeles

Same Old Sun, Same Old Moon

Copyright © by Gaylord Dold

eISBN-13: 978-1-938582-44-8

eISBN-10: 1938582446

Smashwords Edition

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Fiction by Gaylord Dold

Crime Novels

The Nickel Jolt

Same Old Sun, Same Old Moon

The Swarming Stage

Storm 33 (Originally titled, The Last Man in Berlin)

Six White Horses

The Devil to Pay

Schedule Two

Bay of Sorrows

The Mitch Roberts Series

The Wichita Mysteries

Samedi’s Knapsack

The World Beat

Rude Boys

A Penny for the Old Guy

Disheveled City

Muscle and Blood

Bonepile

Cold Cash

Snake Eyes

Hot Summer, Cold Murder

As he gets older he will sometimes

try to inquire into his deepest

wishes, hoping to find a weariness

with life that would make death

less fearsome, but can’t.

Charles Simmons

Key West, Florida

They say there are only two stories in the world.

Well, that’s what they say.

In the first story, a man undertakes a long and difficult journey. Perhaps the journey takes him to foreign lands where he encounters dangerous beasts or mythic creatures. It is possible that the journey is founded upon greed, the search for riches or fame, one of those fabled quests of yore. It might be a race against time, or space travel, or even a holy pilgrimage. If you want to get technical, there’s always the voyage of self-discovery, the refuge of stay-at-home types and last-resort of psychologists. Gypsies and nomads are forever journeying because the road is their home. Others of us are always journeying because we have no home and would like to find one somewhere, anywhere.

The second story is the one in which a stranger comes to town. You’ve heard this one in an infinite number of guises. Some guy climbs off a bus in the city and wanders the street with a gun in his trench coat or a knife in his back pocket, his heart seething with anonymity and aggression. Or he climbs down the ladder of a spaceship on Mars. There are lots of other versions. When the stranger arrives in town there’s going to be a gunfight. All eyes are on the stranger in town, who’s won the heart of the mayor’s daughter. For you stay-at-home types, the stranger is a sudden thought of suicide slipping inside your head at midnight, rain on the windowpane and a train whistle dopplering the horizon. The stranger is a guy fucking your wife in a seedy motel while you’re at work, you holding down a steady job to feed the kids and pay the rent. Or you’re fucking somebody else’s wife and she’s the stranger, of course.

You want to know what I think? No? Well, here goes anyway.

I think there is only one story in the world, one narrative that goes by a billion names. In this story we are alone on a long and difficult journey, and we are strangers wherever we go.

1.

That year I came down to Key West from Miami where I had been working as head of security for a biotech firm in Coral Gables, not a bad gig so far as salary went, but a job that meant shuffling paper and handling political tasks like hiring and firing, reporting on every urine sample that came across my desk. It was August and every day was the same. The sun would come up a little before seven and I’d make coffee and drink it sitting on the balcony of my expensive apartment on the water at Bayside in Coconut Grove. I knew that sun like a brother, let me tell you. Pretty soon after the sun rose, the Atlantic would color up to a nice burnished green-gold and the wind would commence to blow through the palms out on the beach. The clouds were spectacular, the way they’d explode into life as the sun split them like atoms. I’d sit there in my underwear for twenty minutes. After that it was too hot to sit on my nine-hundred-dollar-a-month balcony and I’d go to work at what the bio-technicians called in their brochures a sprawling technical complex, not so far from the campus of the University of Miami. After six weeks on the job it became apparent that I was a dog-bone thrown to Homeland Security and the pack of lawyers who would file paper if a single anthrax bacterium got loose from its titanium canister. Half of every day I spent watching video tapes of employee behaviors, after which I’d write memos that would wind up as recycled trash in the VP for Personnel’s office. At noon a messenger from a medical lab in a mini-mall two blocks over would deliver the urine sample analyses and I’d go through the results. I walked perimeters carrying a fancy plastic Beretta and my superior attitude, until one day a urine sample turned up positive for THC, a sample which belonged to a board member’s software programming son-in-law. One thing led to another and I was asked in private to shit-can the sample, the lab report it came with, and my own written recommendation filed in triplicate. The VP for Personnel confided to me that anyone could have a slip. At any other time or in any other place I’d have gone along with the subterfuge, but I didn’t like my expensive condo-style apartment on the water and I didn’t like the VP for Personnel and I didn’t like the traffic on the South Dixie Highway, so I pretended that I had principles, thinking that I could get a good severance package by holding out.

They showed me the front door like a first wife when the trophy girlfriend shows up.

Breaking the lease was as easy as loading up the old Bronco with my clothes and fishing equipment, heading south down the Dixie and across the Rickenbacker Causeway above Bear Cut where a hundred sailboats dotted the bay like little casks of thousand dollar bills, white as cocaine on a blue velvet background.

The corporate landlord at Bayside in Coconut Grove kept my last month’s rent and my security deposit. The biotech security division never sent my final paycheck. I was broke and friendless and happy in a crazy independent kind of way, the brand of joy a lot of plastic credit can create in the short run. I remember seeing Virginia Key in my rearview mirror, realizing then that I was heading for the last sliver of land on the North American continent, thinking to myself---as Charlie Parker blew a clean frantic line of sax over a tape---that whatever war we were fighting at the moment, whatever moral crusades we might be engaged in, and whatever search for the new American Idol might be going on, I wasn’t in on it. The traffic that August morning was all going the other way from me, folks heading north out of the Keys because of the heat and the coming hurricane season. It seemed like I was the only one going south, the bright gray highway empty ahead of me as the palms went wild in the breeze. You ever feel that way? Like your life is a convertible with the top down, your future a stretch of good road with no road signs?

That was how I wound up inhabiting the top floor of an old conch-house on Angela Street in Key West, across from the Key West Cemetery. It was pushing five o’clock in the afternoon when I got into town, and I drove around for an hour looking for a place to park. I wanted to see the Hemingway House on Whitehead Street, but there was no place to park when I got there, so I toured Bahamas Village, hoping to locate something to rent, but I couldn’t find a place to park there either. The only place to park was on Angela Street across from the graveyard, and as I pulled into a space along the curb, I saw a for rent sign in the front yard of a two story clapboard mansion with a wrap-around veranda. The property was surrounded by a Victorian-style wire fence and the grounds sported a lime tree and one old lemon. The landlady, who lived on the ground floor with her sixty-year-old daughter rented the upper floor to me after I showed her cash for the first and last month’s rent, no questions asked and no application. The place faced south, had three rooms including a large living and dining room just off the veranda, which was shaded by the upper limbs of the fading lemon. It was an old house and smelled like an old person might smell, someone who didn’t get out of bed much and never changed his clothes. The bed was too soft and only two burners of the four worked on the gas stove. You could tell just from looking around at the flowered wallpaper and the smooth wooden floors that palmetto bugs would come out at night and make rounds of the kitchen and bath, but then there’d been palmetto bugs at the expensive condo-style apartment I’d had at Bayside in Coconut Grove too. There was a couch and a couple of easy chairs and an oak table in the dining area, almost no closet space, but three chests for my clothes and fishing lures. My view was of the cemetery, a bulb of sandy waste peppered with hundreds of old mausoleums that stuck out of the ground like rotten teeth, and beyond the cemetery a pretty collection of conch-houses varied in color from peach to crimson to what can only be described as Santeria-green. The neighborhood was noisy on weekends, fairly quiet during the week, but off the main tourist drag, which was Duval Street, a mile or so to the west.

You can get used to living on credit the same way you can get used to being in a bad marriage. It starts out as an enjoyable lark and gradually becomes a bad habit. In between you have only the process of going downhill and not noticing. Halfway toward my own bad habit, I landed a job at the marina near Front Street on the docks as a night security guard. A Cuban named Fuentes hired me for the same reason that many Anglos hire Mexicans. Nobody else wanted do the job, not even his cousins I presumed. I was supposed to walk a beat along the wharf, keeping an eye on the expensive yachts and power boats, a timer-clock to punch and my plastic Baretta on my hip, making sure that no expensive boats were hijacked or broken-into while the rich owners were asleep up in Miami. Nobody wanted the job because it was third shift, midnight to eight in the morning. That was how I found myself watching the sun come up every day a little before seven again, this time from the very end of the continent on the docks at Key West. Same old sun as in Miami.

Unfortunately, meeting people in Key West is easy. Everybody has a story, and everybody in that town thinks they’re Tennessee Williams. I met the two cops who worked days on security for the marina, both moonlighting. Once in a fit of ambition I made the rounds of lawyer offices touting my Florida investigator’s license and my experience in both security and surveillance, making the acquaintance of three or four unusual characters, each of who thought he was Tennessee Williams. Somebody once told me that if you look busy people will think that you actually are busy, and in that way you’ll get a reputation for busyness that will stand you in good stead, whether you’re actually busy or not. So, I looked busy, drank alone, and went fishing with an old guy up on Pine Key I’d once met during a case. A couple of months later I started hosting poker games in the early evening before my shift began, inviting lawyers and cops up to the apartment for cards. Little sums were won and lost.

I learned a lot those first two months in Key West. I learned you can live in the Keys during August without air conditioning if you have the correct mental posture. Another lesson I learned was that there are very few available straight single women in a tourist town like Key West, and almost no women who didn’t blow coke or drink too many Cuba Libre’s. I learned that living without sex was unpleasant, but not nearly so unpleasant as having a monkey on your back all the time. During a poker game one night, a retired cop who had been invited along by one of the lawyers told me that my boss Fuentes was a big shot for a land company responsible for developing half the casinos in the Everglades Indian community, and that he’d once been a narcotics detective with the Key West police department. Nobody had ever told me that. In two months of working for Fuentes, nobody had ever told me that. It came as a surprise.

Finally, one of the lawyers asked me if I’d like to do a simple surveillance. I thought it over for about two seconds and said yes.

Things can go downhill just that fast.

2.

The name Lester Dodge had a certain cachet up and down the Keys, not that he took himself too seriously. He had founded a large personal injury and business litigation law firm on Key Largo about the time Richard Nixon and Beebee Rebozo discovered fondue together. Thirty years later the firm operated clinics and offices up and down the islands, and had penetrated the closed world of Miami officialdom, sometimes representing race tracks, Indian casinos, and boxing promoters whose far-flung enterprises had tentacles that reached all the way to Talahassee and Washington D.C. Very few people knew that Lester was gay, not that it mattered, but he kept a clean, highly-burnished image he fed into dozens of TV commercials appearing on second-rate cable channels every day. With a full head of white hair, leathery tan skin and busy eyebrows, he looked a little like a pool hustler, but he was sharp as a tack, told reasonably good stories after drinking a half-liter of red wine, and didn’t mind playing poker on the veranda at Angela street.

You’re free early evenings, right? he asked me one hard hot Tuesday night after the breeze had died and we were well into the first hour of stud poker. You’ve got a valid Florida investigator’s license?

I shrugged a tepid and thoroughly non-committal ‘yes’ and went on dealing my way through a lousy two pair. I knew Lester could afford to bet large sums of money on poker, but that he refrained from a sense of proportion. In the game were two retired cops, a homicide detective named Lennie Perkins, and a bartender from Dade County by way of Athens, Georgia named Luanne Del Rio. I folded my cards and went on dealing the game.

Surveillance, Dodge whispered in my ear, a thin sheet of sweat on his forehead, is an art that requires a delicate touch. You have a camera?

I told him I did, a slick digital Nikon that weighed less than four ounces, as well as several telephoto attachments for far-away work. He offered me three hundred and fifty dollars for an evening’s work at the old Hickock Inn just outside town on Highway 1, five hundred if the photos produced what he called incriminating evidence. A rich gentleman from Ft. Lauderdale would be in town dallying with prostitutes. Lester confided in me that he’d been retained by the gentleman’s wife, representing her in pending divorce proceedings. Photos would be a slam dunk. I had nothing against such work in the abstract. And the prospect of five hundred dollars was exciting, to say the least.

We have a deal? Lester asked. Without waiting for my reply he handed me a manila envelope containing the name of a hooked-up bellman who would give me access to a cross-balcony from a rented room on the third floor of the motel. The bellman’s last name was Phipps, no first name. I looked the documents over, including a photograph of the gentleman from Ft. Lauderdale, a pot bellied old man about seventy with a bald head and squeamish pig eyes. The bellman was on Lester Dodge’s payroll, and would see to it that the gentleman from Ft. Lauderdale was in the proper room with his playmate for the evening. Nothing could be simpler, Lester Dodge told