“So to what,” he said, “do I owe the honor?”
“I actually have a story for you,” Cooper said. “One with considerable sex appeal, in fact. Though not as much sex appeal as that tape of yours.”
Medvez’s eyes went hard and shifty and Cooper could see most of the on-air aura drain from the newsman’s olive-orange skin.
Cooper got on with it.
“There’s an antiquities smuggling ring,” he said, “part of which is operating out of Naples. May even be a good old-fashioned curse involved, since a string of somewhat upstanding citizens have recently met their demise in connection with the smuggling operation.”
Medvez leaned back in his chair.
“Florida’s got plenty of murders to go around,” he said.
“Well, you can scoop the competition on this one,” Cooper said, “help yourself hold on to that anchor seat and keep getting babes-or whatever. Either way, I’ve got something you’re going to do for me, so you may as well mix in a story along the way.”
Medvez glared at him, his crumpled-up chin looking as though he’d just bitten into a lemon. Cooper pushed across the desk the complete stack of data related to the Polar Bear’s Naples-based fence.
“The man described in these credit reports,” he said, “is the broker for the U.S.-based buyers of the pillaged artifacts. The reason I’m giving you his papers is I want you to find him. What’s in there should be enough for an ace reporter like you to track the guy down.”
Cooper checked his watch.
“I’ll give you until tomorrow afternoon. By then I’ll need to know exactly where I can find him. I’ll come by after the six o’clock news, and once you wipe that fucking makeup off, you’ll take me there and we’ll have a talk with the man. I’ll get you back by eleven and you can stay famous for another night.”
Medvez lifted the stack of papers, Cooper thinking maybe to clock the guy’s name, then dropped the stack back on the desk.
“What the hell you need me for?” he said. “I’m no reporter. I sit behind the desk wearing my ‘fucking makeup’ and say what other people tell me to say. I even wear shorts most of the time I’m on the air-the cameras can’t see below your waist.”
Cooper stretched and yawned.
“I’ve been looking forward to a nice, long run on the beach,” he said. “The kind you don’t get living on an island with only a quarter-mile stretch of sand. I’m sleeping in, tracking down some huevos rancheros, then scooting out for as long a run as I can handle. Presuming my mostly broken-down legs can take it, I’m taking a shot at seven miles out, seven back. When I’m done, I’ll shower off at my hotel, load up on seafood fettuccini at Vergina on Fifth, then stroll over to the Tommy Bahama store and re-stock my wardrobe with the latest in tropical silk fashions.” Cooper stood. “With all that on my plate, it just seems counterproductive, spending my brief stateside time doing something like scrounging up a current address on some black market art smuggler.”
Medvez shook his head, expression still puckered and nasty. The anchor was well aware of the fact he didn’t have any choice in the matter.
Cooper smiled, then mimicked the words Medvez had used to sign off from the news.
“You take care, now,” he said. “See ya tomorrow at six.”
24
Sore from the run, and full after a Polar Bear-size helping of seafood pasta, Cooper rode in the passenger seat of the news anchor’s S500 AMG sedan. Medvez, unmasked, had the wheel. With his deep bronze skin he didn’t look much different without the makeup-Cooper thinking maybe a decade older, provided you were examining him from as close a place as the passenger seat.
“You can see his place from here,” the anchor said.
He pulled into a parking lot serving a set of shops and restaurants called Tin City and parked in a slot that faced the main drag, so that when he tugged the emergency brake they were staring out the front windshield at the condominium tower across the street. The Tin City parking lot was nearly empty; Cooper could see the roof of a tour boat parked in the channel beside the parking lot. He knew the inland-most edge of Naples Bay to reach past Tin City and under Highway 41, where it squeezed down to the size of a creek and dissolved into salty marsh. It was long since dark, and rush hour, what little downtown Naples had of it, had just about wound down for the night.
Medvez handed him a pair of binoculars.
“Second story, corner unit, right side of the building,” he said. “Pretty easy to see most of his place with those curtains pulled.”
Cooper adjusted the lenses and had a look.
“Left his lights on,” he said.
“Place looked that way at six A.M. and again at noon when I came back,” Medvez said. “Unless he gets up real early, I don’t think anybody’s been home since last night.”
“What about the other addresses?”
Medvez shrugged. “Couldn’t reach him at any of his numbers; no answer on his e-mail. Answering machine at the condo you’re looking at gives you one of those computer voices telling you the machine is full. I checked all four of the addresses your documents listed as his places of residence during the last ten years-turns out two were business addresses, two residential. One of the businesses is now one of these banks that pop up every couple of weeks around here, Sun Coast or whatever. Bank just moved in two months ago. One of the residentials is an apartment four miles east on Highway 41, where a single mother and her two loud teenage sons live. The other business address looked pretty much vacant to me, and this was the other address on the list.”
Cooper dropped the binoculars and eyed Medvez.
“Back in the reporting groove, eh?” he said.
Medvez offered another shrug.
“Broke a couple investigative stories to earn the anchor’s seat,” he said, “but that was a long time ago.”
“What do you mean by ‘pretty much vacant’?”
He nodded. “Warehouse. Seafoods, it says, but it doesn’t look or smell dirty enough for that. Might be a cold-storage place-definitely not retail, not where it’s located, over on the bay in about as bad an area as you’ll find around here. Couple of fish-packing firms and tour boat offices next door. There were a few things going on even as late as five in the other buildings, but nothing in your guy’s warehouse. Lights out all day. Nobody working there, no cars in the lot, no boats on the pier. Actually the pier’s busted and rotting, hasn’t seen a boat in a couple hurricanes. Parking lot ain’t much better-quarter-mile dirt road gets you there and you find nothing but the warehouse at the end. The neighboring operations have separate entrance roads and their own asphalt parking lots.”
“You go in yet,” Cooper said, motioning with the binocs, “take a look around the condo or the warehouse?”
Medvez’s face pinched in on itself, that lemon-chewing look again. “Reporting compelled by extortion, yes. Unprompted breaking and entering? No.”
Cooper set the binoculars in the well behind the emergency brake.
“I’ll educate you on the latest techniques,” he said. He motioned in the direction of the building. “What’s a place like that go for? Looks like a two-bedroom, maybe three at most.”
“Right in town here? Seven-fifty, eight.”
“For a territorial view of Tin City and the marsh?”
“Relative paradise, my dear extorter.”
Cooper nodded. He liked the term-relative paradise-if not the concept.
“Let’s have a look,” he said.
The middleman’s Uniden answering machine contained twenty-seven messages. Cooper listened to all of them, determining that twenty of the messages had been left during the prior five days. There did not sound to be anything of substance as to his whereabouts for the evening, at least not that Cooper or Medvez could understand. Cooper took notes on a pad the middleman kept beside the answering machine.