Unsettled by the flattery, DeAntoni made a flapping gesture with his free hand. “You kiddin’? If I had some dago ugly as me followin’ me around, I’d’a called the fuckin’ cops myself.”
Sally seemed not to notice that DeAntoni slapped his hand over his own mouth, nor did she react to the profanity.
“If you have a picture of Geoff that proves he’s alive, I’m more than willing to look.”
“Okay. But I got to warn you right now, Mrs. Minster. There’s another woman in the picture. She ain’t naked or nothing, but she’s kind’a naked. Topless, I mean. I don’t want your feelings gettin’ hurt.”
Her voice steady, not giving it much emotion, Sally said, “The picture won’t bother me. My husband was having sex with the Ashram girls from the time he became a member. Little zombies is what they’re like. It’s allowed. Even if he’s still alive, he’ll never be my husband again. So why don’t you call me Sally? Or Ms. Carmel, if you want to keep it formal.”
When DeAntoni grinned, I noticed for the first time that his upper incisors were a bridge. He’d had his teeth knocked out-no surprise there. “Formal? Oh, no way do I want to keep it formal… Sally.”
My old friend smiled at his eager manner. “Then go get the photos, Frank.”
They were digital photos printed on Kodak ink-jet paper, ultra-glossy, of a man lying on a beach chair, his hand on the thigh of a lean, dark woman. She wore a string bikini bottom, no top. Pink cloth no bigger than the standard dinner napkin. The man looked to be naked but for a billed fishing cap. Both of them comfortable, two lovers judging from the relaxed poses, a couple used to intimate contact.
The photos were similar, both taken from the side, so the man’s face was clearly visible. Because her head was turned away from the lens, the woman’s face was not. In the first photo, you could see her body in profile, and that her brown hair was sun-bleached copper and salty, tied back with a crimson scarf that protruded from a straw sun hat. In the second photo, her back was to the camera, so all you could see were her hips and the hat’s brim.
At the bottom of the photos were a digital date and time stamp: Feb. 2, 4:32 P.M. and 4:35 P.M.
Today was Friday, April 11th. Geoff Minster had supposedly fallen overboard the previous year, somewhere near the Gulf Stream, on his way to Bimini, the night of October 27th.
If the dates were accurate, the photos had been taken three months after Minster had supposedly died.
DeAntoni handed the prints to Sally, who looked at them briefly, shaking her head in distaste or disapproval. She then handed them to me.
“It’s like he’s gone insane,” she told me. “Over a period of three years, he went through a complete personality transformation. Now he does something like this. It’s sick. Truly sick.”
I held the photos, saying to DeAntoni, “Isn’t it easy to change the date stamp on a digital camera?”
He nodded, “You go to the menu, change it to anything you want. Question is, why would someone fake the date, unless they knew Minster was gonna disappear? Why would anyone intentionally want to cause that kind of trouble?”
I said, “Well, one possibility comes to mind. Not a pleasant one.”
“What’s that?”
I said, “If someone planned to murder Minster, they might change the date, take the photograph. Kill the man, but make people like yourself keep looking, thinking he’s still alive. If authorities continue to search for him, they’re not going to waste time searching for the murderers.”
As DeAntoni said, “I hadn’t thought of that one,” Sally murmured, “What an awful idea. It never crossed my mind someone would want Geoff dead.”
I asked DeAntoni, “Are these your only copies?”
“No. I got two more prints made. One’s at my office. One’s with Everglades Home and Life. That’s the insurance company that may have to pay Mrs. Minster-Sally here-four million-five. Did she tell you that it seems pretty certain that the court’s going to rule in her attorney’s favor? Once that happens, the Department of Vital Statistics will issue a death certificate, and then the company will have to pay.”
I nodded as he added, “So I kind’a feel bad asking you to help me. I’m the one trying to prove you shouldn’t get the money.”
I raised my eyebrows, looking into Sally’s handsome face, seeing the dullness of her eyes enliven slightly, as she said, “Before I found my church, before my life changed, wealth and possessions-all that stuff-social status? They meant something. Now, though, I couldn’t care less about the money. So that’s the problem. Money. It’s one of the reasons I came to see you, Doc. And why I’m happy to help you find Geoff if he really is still alive.”
DeAntoni said, “Money’s the problem? You lost me there.”
“I don’t want it. If I do get the insurance money, I’m giving it to my church. Most of it. I’ll keep just enough to live on. But I can’t if there’s a chance I got it illegally, because it’s dirty money. Or if there’s a chance that the insurance company will demand it back.”
To DeAntoni, I said, “If they write the check, there’s not much chance they’ll do that, is there?”
The big man looked uneasy. “I think the last they want to do is get their name in the papers for that kind’a scandal. The Feds would have to be involved. But for four million-five. Yeah, they’d take their bruises, suck it up. They’d want the money back.”
I asked, “Scandal?”
Sally said to DeAntoni, “I haven’t told Doc the whole story yet. He doesn’t know.”
I said, “What don’t I know?”
DeAntoni told me, “About the insurance company. Minster was one of the founders of Everglades Home and Life. The last bad hurricane, whatever its name was, it flattened a couple of big developments that he built. The insurance companies paid off, but they went bankrupt doing it.”
Sally took over. “Geoff and some other developers around Miami couldn’t get insurance. People who wanted to buy a new house couldn’t get insurance. It was a mess. So Geoff and some of his business associates came up with their own solution. He was brilliant in his way. Driven, but brilliant.”
DeAntoni said, “What he did was pretty smart. His group did the research and calculated that, when a certain area of Florida is hit by a really bad storm, there’s almost always a ten-to-twenty-year gap before it’s likely to get hit again. Statistically. Those’re good odds. How much can you make writing clean insurance over fifteen years? Start in the high millions, then add some nice big numbers at the front.
“So they found investors, formed a company and applied to the Florida Department of Insurance. To push through the kind’a thing they wanted takes a lot of political juice. They had it.
“In June, about three years ago, the state approved them as what they call a foreign property and casualty insurer, and accepted them into the state homeowners’ insurance pool. What that means is, that quick”-DeAntoni snapped his fingers-“they were guaranteed to write policies on over a quarter million private homes and businesses. The insurance racket, man, it’s got its own language. They were granted a bunch of lines of business: Homeowners’ Multi-Peril, Commercial Multi-Peril, Auto, Ocean Marine, Health… and life insurance, too.”
“Geoff had life insurance through his own company,” Sally said.
I asked DeAntoni, “Aside from Sally, were there other beneficiaries?”
“Yeah, and I’ll give you one guess who. The company may have to write out a whole lot bigger check to the International Church of Ashram Meditation. More than four times what they would pay to Sally.”
“That explains it,” I said. Meaning why they’d hired DeAntoni to find out the truth-a small insurance company with a reason to keep things private and quiet, and maybe not have to go bankrupt.
chapter ten
I walked the two of them through mangroves to the marina. I hadn’t eaten since that morning-my camp breakfast in the Everglades. Not a very good breakfast, either, since Tomlinson had loaded his goofy little group with health-food types. We’d had bulgur wheat and a slab of some kind of fibrous-looking substance that was supposed to be a substitute for meat.