Orchid Beach

CHAPTER

47

The next morning, Holly was back at her desk. She and Harry Crisp had agreed that she should keep something like regular office hours so that, if anyone were keeping tabs on her, she would appear to be doing nothing out of the ordinary. She was working her way through the stack of personnel files when Hurd Wallace rapped at her door.

“Morning, Hurd,” Holly said. “Come in and have a seat.”

“Morning,” he said, sitting down.

“What’s up?”

“I feel sort of out of the loop,” Wallace said.

“What loop is that?”

“Well, I’m beginning to get the impression that you know something about Chet Marley’s murder that I don’t.”

“What makes you think that?”

“You seem to be doing a lot of investigative work these days that I’m cut out of,” Wallace said.

“Such as?”

“You’re making trips to the county planning office and looking up documents there; you’ve had Barney Noble in here, and he didn’t look happy; and then you interrogated that guy yesterday, the one whose picture you had up on the bulletin board a while back.”

“All that is true, I guess.”

“What’s it all about, Holly?”

“Well, it’s no big thing, Hurd. I found out that this guy, who is one of Barney’s security guards, has a criminal record and shouldn’t be licensed for security work or to carry a gun.”

“And what did you do about it?”

“Barney promised me he’d take him off security work, so I haven’t done anything, except talk to him.”

“Why’d you sic the dog on him?”

“How’d you know about the dog?”

“She made a lot of noise.”

“I didn’t sic her onto the guy. She just didn’t like him, I guess. I don’t know why.”

Hurd nodded.

“What’s the problem, Hurd? What’s on your mind?”

“Tell you the truth, I get the very strong impression that you don’t trust me to do my job. Ever since you got here, we’ve hardly talked about anything, and I guess we didn’t have to, until I got the deputy chief’s job. But now I figure I ought to know everything that’s going on.”

Holly felt cornered. Wallace was right; she didn’t trust him, but she hadn’t meant for him to know that. “I’m sorry I’ve given you that impression,” she said.

“You know, if Chet had confided in me about what he was working on, we would probably have already made an arrest in his killing. And now you’re working on something you’re keeping from me. What happens if you end up dead? Where is the department then?”

“Hurd, you have a very good point there.”

“It doesn’t seem to be doing me very much good, Holly. Are you going to bring me in on this or shut me out?”

“There isn’t anything to shut you out of, Hurd. Ask me questions, and I’ll give you answers.”

“Do you have some particular interest in Palmetto Gardens?”

“What do you know about that place, Hurd?”

“Just what everybody else knows: practically nothing. What do you know about it?”

“Just about what you know,” she lied. “You think we ought to know more about it?”

“I certainly do.”

“Why?”

“I know it doesn’t come as a surprise to you that we have what amounts to a city-state, right here in our jurisdiction—that they don’t allow us to patrol out there, that we can’t even enter the place unless we’re escorted. Doesn’t that bother you?”

“It did until I visited the place,” Holly said.

Wallace came close to changing his expression. “You visited the place?”

“I’ve been out there a couple of times. Barney Noble gave me the five-cent tour, and he invited my father and me to play golf out there once. He and my dad served in the army together.”

“What’s it like out there?”

Holly told him about her two visits.

“I don’t like the idea of the security people having automatic weapons,” he said.

“Neither do I, much,” Holly replied, “but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Wallace shrugged. “We could make a stink at the state level about the licenses being issued.”

“The automatic weapons licenses?”

“Couldn’t hurt.”

“You think we could get the licenses pulled?”

“Maybe. I know some people.”

“We’d need more than personal contacts, Hurd. If the licenses were canceled, Barney would request a hearing and get it. He’d be able to say that none of his people had ever fired one in anger.”

“And we’d be able to say that they’ve no need for more firepower than we have in our department.”

“I don’t know what that would get us, except to alert Barney Noble that we have more than a passing interest in what he’s doing out there.”

“Would that be a bad thing?” Wallace asked. “It might rattle him a little.”

“What’s the purpose of rattling him?”

“To let him know that we take an interest in what goes on on our turf.”

“I think I’ve already let him know that, with this Cracker Mosely thing.”

“What’s Cracker Mosely?”

“The man I interrogated yesterday.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s an ex-cop out of Miami. He killed a drug dealer with his baton and did time for it.” Holly wanted to see where Wallace would go with that information.

He wrinkled his brow, a major use of facial expression for him. “And yet he got licensed for security work?”

“And to carry a gun.”

“How’d that happen?”

“A computer check showed no criminal record.”

“Well, that’s a major lapse, isn’t it?”

“I thought so.”

“Have you called anybody at state records to find out why?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

Holly shrugged. “I just want to let it ride for a while and see what happens.”

“While you’re letting it ride, I’d like to run records checks on all the security people out there.”

“How? We don’t even have their names,” Holly said.

“I could run a check on security-guard licenses issued in Orchid and cross-check that against the Palmetto Gardens addresses.”

Now Holly was stuck. So far she hadn’t told him anything that Barney Noble didn’t already know, but this was new territory. She took a deep breath. “I’ve already done that, Hurd.”

“So you have a list of the security people?”

“Yep.”

Wallace shook his head. “You might have told me that a few minutes ago and saved me all these questions.”

“I wanted to see what questions you’d ask, Hurd.”

“Well, my next question is, does anybody else with a criminal record belong to the Palmetto Gardens security department?”

Wallace was now only a step from where Holly’s curiosity had taken her, and she saw that it would cost her nothing to make it easier for him.

“Well, yes and no,” she said.

There was a tiny ripple of anger across Wallace’s placid face.

Holly held up a hand. “There are a hundred and two people at Palmetto Gardens who are licensed to carry weapons.”

“A hundred and two?”

“That’s right. Only fifteen of them are security guards, in the formal sense.”

“Have you checked to see if any of them has a criminal record, like Mosely?”

“None of them shows a criminal record in the state computer system.”

“Yeah, but neither did Mosely.”

Holly took a deep breath and let it all out. “Seventy-one of them show up in the national crime computer as having criminal records.”

Wallace stared blankly at her for a moment while he digested that information.

“What do you think I ought to do, Hurd?” Holly asked.

“I think you ought to call the fucking FBI,” he said. “Right now,” he said, pointing. “There’s the phone.”

Holly laughed. She would have thought Wallace incapable of such an outburst.

“Let me tell you my problem, Hurd,” she said. There was no point in holding this back any longer. “Chet Marley thought there was someone in this department who was working with…somebody outside this department.”

Wallace’s mouth dropped open. “And you thought it was me?”

“I thought it was a possibility,” Holly said. “The same possibility applies to everybody else in the department.” Then Wallace did something Holly thought she would never see. He burst out laughing.