Murder in Paradise

By Fred Cerrato

Pete and Lucia Christos are citizens of Burlington, Vermont and are tired of the harsh, punishing winters. They decide to escape to the warmer climes of Florida during the winter months.

Pete and his son, Dave, are proprietors of a detective agency in Burlington, and his wife, Lucia, and his daughter-in-law, Camille, run a travel agency in the same building as Pete on Church Street in Burlington.

After much surfing on their computer and much reading of brochures, the couple decide to visit Paradise Village, an over fifty -five community in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

After touring the facility with the Sales Manager, Barry Gerber, they fall in love with the gated community and decide to rent a cottage. They both become immersed in the activities and amenities of the community which offers club memberships, access to professional golf courses, a clubhouse with a grand ballroom, and indoor and outdoor pools among other amenities. The grounds and cottages are immaculate.

Many residents of the Village are elderly and are being cared for in their cottages by nurses and home help aides. When there is an uptick in the deaths of these elderly patients, Barry Gerber asks Pete for help in investigating the demise of these patients. Pete asks his son, Dave, to come down from Vermont for a visit so that he can help his dad with the investigation. What they uncover is a murderer in their midst who threatens the very existence of Paradise Village.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 23, 2024
• ISBN: 9781663262196

Fred Cerrato

Fred Cerrato was a Middle School Reading Teacher and Reading Specialist for forty years in his hometown of Bloomfield, New Jersey. His high school basketball team won the state championship in 1958. He was named to All-County and All-State basketball teams and earned a basketball scholarship to St. Michaels College in Winooski, Vermont where he was the starting point guard for four years. He was named to the All-Vermont team in 1962. He was an English major in College and has written three books "A Vermont Basketball Story", "The Cruise Detectives", and "Murder in Paradise."

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MURDER

in

PARADISE

FRED CERRATO

MURDER IN PARADISE

Copyright © 2024 Fred Cerrato.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

iUniverse

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-6632-6220-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-6219-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024908090

iUniverse rev. date: 04/16/2024

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Epilogue

CHAPTER 1

I T WAS ALMOST TWO o’clock in the morning as his car coasted quietly to a halt in front of the designated house. He had driven the last few blocks with the headlights off. He didn’t want to attract any attention to himself. He turned on his flashlight and shined it upon his clipboard, which had the name and the address of the victim. He didn’t want to go into the wrong house, especially at that time of night. The name on the clipboard was Pratt, and the house number was twenty. He carefully trained his flashlight to the left side of the front door, where the house number was displayed. The number twenty appeared. It was the right h ouse.

He was dressed in a hoodie, and his face was covered by a mask. A cacophony of sounds of the Florida night assaulted him as he disembarked from his car. He quietly shut his car door as he heard the screaming cicadas and the barking and croaking tree frogs. He stepped on an unlucky palmetto bug, crushing it with his shoe.

He was carrying a small satchel. Among the items inside was a hypodermic needle containing a fatal serum that would cause immediate death. It had been prearranged that the door would be unlocked so he could easily enter the house. The home health aide would not be there. She was at her home and would be back in the morning. The victim had taken medication that would help her sleep. It would only take ten minutes to locate the victim and do the deed. He straightened his mask and his hoodie and confidently entered the house.

Barry Gerber was the sales manager of Paradise Village, a fifty-five-and-over retirement community in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His office was well appointed with leather sofas and chairs, and the bookcases that lined the walls were mahogany and patterned after libraries in medieval England. Oriental rugs were spread wall to wall, and the walls were painted a subtle gray. The room was a mix of old and new. A seventy-inch TV monitor hung on the wall, and modern iMac computers were in study carrels along the wall. Barry had an Apple laptop computer on his oak desk. His laptop controlled the images shown on the wall monitor. Photos of model homes, cottages, condos, and activities were shown to illustrate the many advantages of living in Paradise Village.

Barry was giving his spiel to Frank and Joan Whorley from Ithaca, New York. They were sitting in his office, listening to his comprehensive presentation. Frank was seventy-one years old, and Joan was eighty-one. Joan’s friends all called her a cougar for marrying a much younger man. He was a retired anesthesiologist, and she was a retired nurse.

Frank was a handsome man with blue eyes and neatly coiffed silver-gray hair. He was above average height at six feet, two inches, and he kept in shape by jogging, lifting weights, and playing golf. Joan had once been a stunning beauty with raven-black hair, brown eyes, and a voluptuous figure, but age had taken its toll. Her hair was white and straggly, and she was overweight and suffered from emphysema. Her breathing was characterized by wheezing.

Their home in Ithaca was paid for, and they were in the process of selling it and moving to Florida full-time. They listened to Gerber’s presentation with rapt attention. They had done extensive research on over-fifty-five communities in Florida and were sold on Paradise Village. In their minds, it was perfect, and they were ready to put a down payment on one of the quaint cottages. As soon as they received the proceeds from their sold house in Ithaca, they would have the cash for their new place in Florida. They would not need a mortgage. It would be a cash transaction.

Frank had heard from friends that there were a lot of widows and divorcées in those communities. He thought maybe he could find himself a girlfriend. Although he still loved Joan and took care of her, with each passing day, she became less appealing. Frank felt he was still young and virile, and he wanted to have some fun. With all the amenities the community afforded him, it did, in fact, feel like paradise, and he wanted to take advantage of it.

Joan tried to take care of herself. She took vitamins and religiously took her medication, but at eighty-one, her body was failing her. The emphysema made her rasp and made it hard to breathe. She had arthritis, which affected the shape of her fingers and made her joints painful. She found it difficult to keep her balance. She tried to exercise, but that only intensified her pain. Even though she exercised, she was gaining weight. She noticed that Frank ogled younger women, but who could have blamed him? She was a mess. She hoped the change of scenery to Florida would help her. She was going to hire a personal trainer and go on a diet that she hoped would help her lose fifty pounds. She was going to dye her hair and have it styled. Although she was eighty-one, she wasn’t dead, and she vowed she was going to do whatever it took to get into shape.

Barry Gerber finished his presentation, and Frank and Joan signed the papers to close the deal. The only things left to do were to pick the model of their cottage and then to design their upscale kitchen, bathroom, and bedroom. Once that was done, Frank and Joan were on their way to Paradise.

They would now return to Ithaca and close on their house. It was all coming to fruition. It would be a new beginning, a physical as well as mental renaissance. They were leaving the dread of winter, and instead of dealing with sleet and snow, they would be having cocktails on their lanai and swimming in their pool. They would ride around the streets in golf carts instead of slipping and sliding on mounds of snow. It was a wonderful prospect. In several weeks, they would be in Florida for good.

The weather forecast called for temperatures hovering near zero degrees Fahrenheit, with twenty inches of snow. There were wind squalls of thirty miles per hour, which caused foam-capped tsunami waves that whipped off Lake Champlain and slapped at the rocky Burlington, Vermont, shore. The howling wind caused blizzard conditions as the malevolent sleet and snow blanketed streets and buildings. Parking meters appeared as midget snowmen as the ascending snowdrifts covered mailboxes and cars along the streets of Burlington.

Under those weather conditions, even intrepid Vermonters were inclined to stay indoors and wait it out. They were used to snow, and the plows would be out soon, but the zero-degree temperatures, thirty-mile-per-hour wind, and blizzard-like conditions made travel treacherous. Schools and businesses were closed, and most people were hunkered down in their abodes.

It was late afternoon, and Pete and Lucia Christos were watching the Weather Channel in their four-season solarium. The solarium was outfitted with a wood-burning stove that Pete kept feeding with seasoned oak logs. Pete was enjoying a Manhattan on the rocks, Lucia was sipping a vodka gimlet, and they were snacking on some crackers and brie.

They could hear the snow and sleet assaulting their house, and in that type of weather, power was often lost. They had installed a whole-house generator several years ago, so Pete didn’t have to worry about gassing up a portable generator and running extension cords all over the house. He was too old for that nonsense anymore. In the olden days, he had split logs for hours on end and stacked them in the yard to season. Now he ordered two cords of wood and hoped it would last through the winter season.

As they sipped their cocktails and ate their brie and crackers, they both surfed the internet on their iPads. Pete had Apple and Google news apps that kept him abreast of the local, national, and world news. He also had many sports apps to follow hockey, soccer, and basketball scores.

Lucia had many of the same news apps as Pete, but instead of sports, she had apps from the Food Channel and HGTV and apps that concentrated on travel, since she was the proprietor of a travel agency.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a place in Florida, where we could escape all the snow, especially in December, January, and February? asked Lucia.

I thought you liked the snow. You like to cross-country ski and snowboard. I never heard you complain before, said Pete.

I’ve always liked the snow, but as I grow older, it’s becoming more of a nuisance. The cold weather is affecting my arthritis, and I’m afraid of slipping and falling on the ice. I think we’ve paid our dues with the weather and deserve a break.

I used to love chopping wood in the backyard in the cold weather. It was macho and invigorating, but I agree. We’re both getting older and have arthritis. The cold has a negative effect on our health.

It’s really cozy in here, sipping our cocktails and eating our cheese and crackers by the wood-burning stove, but at some point, we have to go outside and deal with the snow. Then the snow stops, and we get plowed out, but then we get another storm. It goes on and on ad infinitum. A lot of Vermont snowbirds come into the travel agency, and I book their flights down to Florida. They rave about how wonderful it is to be away from all this cold weather. I’ve been surfing the internet, looking at over-fifty-five communities in Florida. Would you ever want to become a snowbird?

So you’re thinking of keeping our place in South Burlington but renting or owning a place in a fifty-five-and-over community in Florida? asked Pete.

I’m not sure about renting or owning a place in Florida. Maybe we could rent a small house or condo for several months during the winter to see if we like it. If we like it, we could buy a place and come down during the winter to get away from the snow. I wouldn’t want to do it all year-round. Vermont is beautiful in the spring, summer, and fall.

"Let’s both do some research to see what’s out there. I’m sure you could get a lot of brochures sent to your travel agency. Do we agree that we want to go to Florida? What section of Florida would we want? If we found a place in Fort Lauderdale, we could easily hop on a cruise for a week. That would be an added bonus. Let’s concentrate on the Fort Lauderdale area. I’m sure they have a plethora