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“Eddie, I’m sorry. Julio made a sudden decision to come home Friday morning. There was no scheduled flight back, so he hitched a lift on a private plane for Key West. It never made it. The plane went down from fifteen thousand feet into the sea, fifty miles short of Key West. The Coast Guard says there were no survivors.”
Favaro sat down. He shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”
“I hardly can myself. Look, I’m terribly sorry, Eddie. I know you were close.”
“Nine years,” whispered Favaro. “Nine years he watched my back. What happens now?”
“The machine takes over,” said Broderick. “I’ll tell the Director myself. You know the procedure. If we can’t have a funeral service, we’ll have a memorial. Full departmental honors. I promise.”
* * *
The suspicions came later that night and the next morning.
On Sunday, a charter skipper named Joe Fanelli had taken two small English boys fishing out of Bud ‘n’ Mary’s Marina on Islamorada, a resort in the Florida Keys well north of Key West. Six miles out beyond Alligator Reef, heading for the Hump and trolling as they went, one of the boys took a big bite on his line. Between them the brothers, Stuart and Shane, hauled in what they hoped was a big kingfish or wahoo or tuna. When the catch came up in the wake, Joe Fanelli leaned down and hauled it aboard. It turned out to be the remnants of a life-jacket, still bearing the stenciled number of the airplane to which it had once belonged, and some scorch marks.
The local police sent it up to Miami, where the forensic laboratory established that it had come from Barney Klinger’s Navajo Chief, and that the scorch marks bore traces not of gasoline but of plastic explosive. It became a Homicide investigation.
The first thing Homicide did was check on the business affairs of Mr. Klinger. What they discovered caused them to think the case was a dead end. They had, after all, no mandate on the British territory of Sunshine, and little confidence that the local force would get to the bottom of what had to be a professional hit.
On Tuesday morning Sam McCready eased himself onto his poolside lounger at the Sonesta Beach Hotel on Key Biscayne, settled his second after-breakfast coffee on the table by his side, and opened the Miami Herald.
Without any particular interest, he scanned the paper for international news—there was precious little—and settled for local affairs. The second lead concerned fresh revelations in the disappearance of a light airplane over the sea southeast of Key West the previous Friday morning.
The news sleuths of the Herald had discovered not only that the plane might well have been destroyed by a bomb inside it, but that Mr. Barney Klinger was known as the uncrowned king of the illicit trade, theft, and laundering of spare aviation parts in South Florida.
After narcotics, this abstruse area of illegal behavior is probably the most lucrative. Florida bristles with airplanes—airliners, cargo freighters, and private aircraft. It also contains some of the world’s major legitimate companies in the provision of constantly needed new or reconditioned spare parts. AVIOL and the Instrument Locator Service supply replacement parts on a worldwide scale.
The illegitimate industry, on the other hand, specializes either in commissioning the theft of such parts for no-questions-asked sales to other (usually Third World) operators, or in the even more dangerous purveying of parts whose operational life is almost expended, selling them as reconditioned parts with most of their operational life still left. For the latter scam, the paperwork is forged. Since some of these parts sell for a quarter of a million dollars each, the profits for a ruthless operator can be huge.
Speculation was running high that someone had wanted to remove Mr. Klinger from the scene.
“In the midst of life,” murmured McCready, and turned to the weather forecast. It was sunny.
Lieutenant Broderick summoned Eddie Favaro on that same Tuesday morning. He was even more grave than he had been the day before.
“Eddie, before we proceed with the memorial service with full honors for Julio, we have to consider a troubling new factor. What the hell was Julio doing sharing a plane with a sleazeball like Klinger?”
“He was trying to get back home,” said Favaro.
“Was he? What was he doing down there?”
“Fishing.”
“Was he? How come he was sharing the same week on Sunshine with Klinger? Did they have business to discuss?”
“Clay, listen to me. No way—no way in this world—was Julio Gomez corrupt. I won’t believe it. He was trying to get home. He saw a plane, he asked for a ride, is all.”
“I hope you’re right,” Broderick said soberly. “Why was he trying to get home two days ahead of schedule?
“That?
??s what puzzles me,” admitted Favaro. “He loved his fishing, looked forward to it all year. He would never have cut short two days of fishing without a reason. I want to go over there and find out why.”
“You have three reasons for not going,” said the lieutenant. “This department is overworked, you are needed here, and any bomb—if bomb there was—was certainly aimed at Klinger. The girl and Julio were accidents. Sorry, Internal Affairs will have to check out Julio’s financial situation. It can’t be avoided. If he never met Klinger before Friday, it was just a tragic accident.”
“I’ve got some leave time due me,” said Favaro. “I want it, Clay. I want it now.”
“Yes, you’ve got some leave time. And I can’t deny it to you. But you go there and you’re on your own, Eddie. That’s British territory—we have no authority there. And I want your gun.”