Robert B. Parker’s Someone to Watch Over Me

23

No matter how much and how well I flirted with the clerk, we found no misdemeanor or felony charges against Peter Steiner in Palm Beach County. Not so much as a parking ticket. We did, however, learn that eighteen months ago, a man named Jorge “Pepe” De Santos sued Steiner for breach of contract. According to the suit, Steiner withheld payment to De Santos for landscaping services at his compound in Seagrass, Florida, and still owed him five grand.

“Well, that was one big waste of time,” Mattie said, walking back to the car. The sun very high and hot over the parking lot.

“The devil thrives in the details.”

“Not this bastard.”

“Can you believe that woman wasn’t taken with my charm?”

“I think you annoyed her,” she said. “Maybe you’re better in Boston.”

“My charm defies borders.”

Pepe De Santos owned a company called Fighting Fitzpatrick Landscapers Inc., which sat at the end of a dead-end street in Lake Worth. The sky seemed bigger and bluer here, expansive, with momentary white clouds passing overhead. One-story ranch houses with small palms and palmettos lined the mostly residential street.

Fighting Fitzpatrick Landscapers consisted of two white single-wide trailers and a large metal barn. Small plants and trees sat in plastic buckets among giant mounts of soil and mulch. A sprinkler click-click-clicked, watering a grouping of flowers in long flats. Several white pickup trucks were parked along the chain-link fence, with trailers loaded with riding lawn mowers and weed trimmers. Men in dirty white shirts and work pants came and went from the big metal barn.

I asked one where to find De Santos, and he pointed inside.

As we walked into the open barn, I thought I heard the music of Pérez Prado playing. But since I only knew “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,” I couldn’t be positive. Hawk would’ve known. He had spent a considerable amount of time in Cuba.

A wiry little man in shorts and no shirt stood at a workbench, sharpening a long mower blade. The blade was held in a large vise, the man’s hands large and streaked with grease as he worked a file back and forth.

“Mr. De Santos?” I said.

He nodded, picked up a cigarette, and turned down the radio. His skin was very dark and leathery. He had a full head of black hair flecked with gray. His muscles knotted and corded like an old fisherman’s. He looked like the kind of guy who might’ve had his prize marlin eaten by sharks.

“Pérez Prado?” I said.

He shook his head. “Beny Moré.”

“Ah.”

“My father’s favorite,” De Santos said, with the slightest accent, taking a drag off a cigarette and setting it on the corner of the workbench. “So romantic.”

The barn smelled of dirt and old oil, a little freshly cut grass, too. Weed trimmers and blowers hung from the ceilings, along with an armada of riding lawn mowers parked along the concrete floor. Everything was neat and orderly. Every tool had its place in a long stretch of pegboard. Three men covered in sweat and grass stains walked in behind us.

De Santos waved them away with a hand. “How may I help you?”

“We came to talk to you about Peter Steiner,” Mattie said.

The corded muscles in De Santos’s neck and shoulders stiffened. He lifted the cigarette but didn’t take a drag. Beny Moré sang on. I couldn’t tell Beny Moré from Pérez Prado from Xavier Cugat. All I knew is that Xavier Cugat always had a Chihuahua when he took photos.

“I have nothing to say about that man,” De Santos said. He picked up the file and continued to sharpen the blade. Somewhere outside a truck started, and you could hear the jostling of the trailer following behind.

“We don’t work for Steiner,” I said.

“Yeah,” Mattie said. “Steiner is a complete creep.”

De Santos stopped sharpening again and lifted his eyes to both of us. He took a drag from the cigarette. “How can I be sure?” he said.

I showed him my license.

“You are a long way from home,” he said. “And who is she?”

“My boss,” I said.

De Santos shrugged and took a seat on a stool by the workbench. The air was heavy with smoke and the tang of sharpened metal. “That man wouldn’t pay me for two months’ work,” he said. “He is a thief. I’ve kept this business going because people know I do good work. And I do what I promise. Just like the man who had this business before me.”

“You mean you’re not the original Fighting Fitzpatrick?”

De Santos laughed and let out a little smoke from the side of his mouth. “The business is very well known,” De Santos said. “Mr. Steiner turned longtime customers against me. He tells them lies about my work. He says that I walked off the job and left his estate a mess. All lies.”

Mattie asked what happened as a heavyset Latina in khaki pants and a T-shirt adorned with a shamrock walked into the barn. She held a white paper sack, looked to us and smiled, and dropped the sack onto the bench.

De Santos fired off something to her in Spanish, nodding to me and Mattie.

Without missing a beat, Mattie, also in Spanish, seemed to clarify something for him. He looked to the woman and nodded.

The woman looked to us and then back to De Santos as if deciding what to believe.

“I didn’t know you knew Spanish,” I said.

“You never asked,” Mattie said. “Mr. De Santos doesn’t trust us.”

I touched my chest with my right hand. “Don’t I look trustworthy?”

Mattie turned back to De Santos and the woman and spoke to them for a long while in both Spanish and English. True to her Boston upbringing, she used her hands a lot. She said we were investigators working for young girls Peter Steiner had abused.

The woman nodded at De Santos and left the metal barn.

De Santos didn’t touch whatever lunch he’d been brought. His resolve was impressive. The food smelled wonderful, and I hadn’t eaten since the flight.

“I couldn’t go there another day,” De Santos said. “This man is the devil.”

“How?” Mattie said.

“Please.”

Mattie reached into her pocket for her cell phone. She thrust the phone forward and scrolled through several images.

“They’re just kids,” she said.

“The girls I saw were young, too,” he said. “One day I saw two girls swimming in the pool. They were both completely naked. Children. Just children. Not developed. Not of age. I saw Steiner come outside in a robe. He took the robe off and jumped in to join them. I ignored them and kept working in the flower garden. What I saw later turned my stomach. Steiner’s gray head between the legs of a young girl. I gathered my men and my equipment and left. I sent him a bill for the weeks of work I’d done. He refused to pay.”

“Was that the first time you saw him with kids?” I said.

“No,” De Santos said. “But it was the worst. Something I couldn’t ignore. Steiner has many friends. Many who join him in this. I have worked in this county long enough to know how to keep to myself. Mr. Fitzpatrick worked on the Miami estates of many drug lords and never said a word. But this is different. This man is different. It is a secret world behind his gates. And if you speak out against him or say a word, men will come for you. They have harassed me many times.”

“What kind of men?” I said.

“Men with expensive haircuts and dark suits,” he said. “They come from Miami and threatened my business and my family if I ever discussed what I saw. They spoke to me like I was some orange picker who didn’t know the law. I have lived in this country for forty years, Mr. Spenser. They were not the police. They had no right to come into my home and tell me what to do.”

“Why not go to the police?” I said.

“In Palm Beach County?” De Santo said, snorting. “Only more of the same. Men like Steiner own the police and the judges. Perhaps I saw judges and politicians in his pool.”

“Did you?” Mattie said.

De Santos gave a small, noncommittal shrug. “Here, you are either moneyed or not. I’m just the hired help. Same as you. I will never get paid for my work. And lawyers are very expensive. More than I make.”

“I am well aware,” I said.

“Steiner knows he never has to pay me,” De Santos said. “He tells lies to put me in my place.”

“What do you know about these men who came to scare you?” Mattie said.

“Dark cars like men in government,” he said. “Dade County license plates.”

“Do you think they were cops?” I said.

“They didn’t say they were,” he said, finishing the cigarette. He crushed it in a Café Bustelo can filled with sand. “Or if they were not. They reminded me of those men who investigate aliens.”

“That’s bullshit,” Mattie said. “You’re a citizen with rights.”

“Aliens,” De Santos said, smiling and pointing upward to the sky. “Men in black.”

“Maybe Peter Steiner is from another planet,” I said.

“I know he is not a man,” De Santos said, squinting into the smoke. “This man has no heart. No soul. And no honor.”

“I’d like to see where he lives.”

De Santos held up a hand and walked over to a tool kit on the bench. He handed me a plastic card with Seagrass Express written on it. “No one gets on the island without one of these.”