PEDESTAL (JAKE SCARNE THRILLERS Book 5) Read online

  “Well, that kind of devotion is either an argument for marriage, or against it. I can’t decide. Anyway, I got the house, which was their winter home, and I stayed. First it was inertia, I guess, but then I grew to like it down here. It’s not forever, but the living is easy in Port Royal, as you might have noticed.”

  “It’s a beautiful area. I’m surprised the community is not gated like most of them in this part of Florida. It reeks with wealth.”

  “I think thieves show us professional courtesy.”

  Scarne laughed.

  “That’s pretty cynical.”

  “I know. I’m just being bitchy. Two of those gals I played tennis with are married to 30-something, pasty-faced hedge fund managers. I’ve been to their houses for cocktails or dinner. The men all sit around talking about how much money they make trading derivatives and futures contracts and lamenting the recent influx of “nouveau riche” to their neighborhood. They and their wives are always trying to fix me up with one of their friends.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. Just as easy to love a rich guy as a poor one.”

  “Someone told you that.”

  Scarne smiled.

  “Yes. Years ago. Just before she dumped me for a plastic surgeon.”

  Sharon laughed.

  “God. It’s such a damn hassle isn’t it? Dating, mating, whatever you want to call it. Anyway, I don’t want to be anyone’s second, third or fourth wife, which is what I’d be if I got involved with some of the losers I meet at parties. Hell, I’m not sure I want to be anyone’s first wife. Maybe I’ll try it someday, but I don’t need money. My folks were “old riche” from Minnesota. Turkeys. Would you believe it? Minnesota is the nation’s largest producer of farm-raised turkeys and Mom and dad had one of the largest farms in the state. I hate goddamn Thanksgiving. And I make a good living on my own.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Promise you won’t laugh.”

  “I’ll try not to. But no promises.”

  “I’m a marine biologist.”

  Scarne laughed.

  “Sorry. I’m not laughing at you. But I wish you were with me a couple of hours ago.”

  He told her about his conversation with the man at Anthony Desiderio’s house.”

  “Brownpeace! Oh, that’s priceless. I’ll have to tell my students.”

  “Students?”

  “Yes. When I’m not wearing flippers I teach at Collier University. Do you scuba dive?”

  “I’ve done it.”

  “Maybe we could go some time.”

  “I’d like that. But isn’t it quite a commute to Collier?”

  “College professors have one of the great gigs in the world. I teach three classes a week, have weekends, holidays and summers off. I think I can manage. When I was in Boston I was on a tenure track at Harvard. They told me I might not have to show up but once a week. Adjuncts and teaching assistants would handle the bulk of the course load. I thought that a bit much.”

  Their lunch came. Lobster rolls and Stella Artois Belgian beer for both.

  “Cold water lobster,” he said. “Excellent. I thought they might use Caribbean rock lobsters.”

  “Our chef tried that once. He was executed.”

  “Drawn butter and quartered?”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Sorry. What can you tell me about Tony Desiderio?”

  “Ooh. A real detective question. I was wondering when you were going to get around to it.”

  “I wanted to make sure I got lunch first.”

  She hesitated.

  “I’m not a gossip.”

  “And I’m not a reporter for a tabloid. I’m not looking for gossip.”

  “I’ve been to a couple of his parties. They are pretty famous among what passes for the ‘fast set’ around here. Tony has made a run at my knickers. In my case, he was unsuccessful. He’s a bit too kinky for me. Wanted to know if I wanted to go up to his bedroom and watch some of his sex videos.”

  “Porn?”

  “That’s what I assumed. I guess they have replaced etchings as a come on. Not my cup of tea. But a couple of my friends who had a fling with Tony said they were more like home movies. Regular people. Very erotic. They said I didn’t know what I was missing.”

  Sharon Ross looked at Scarne and grinned.

  “I said that Tony didn’t know what he was missing.”

  After lunch, Scarne walked Sharon Ross out to her car. It was a powder-blue Maserati convertible.

  “I presume this makes your commute a little shorter,” he said, dryly. “What’s its top speed? Warp 5?”

  “It is a bit much, isn’t it? But one of the hedge-fund yahoos who buy a new car every year gave me a deal I couldn’t resist. It’s four years old. I tell people I drive a used car. But I love it.” She looked at Scarne in mock suspicion. “Say, you’re not after me for my money, are you?”

  “I am now.”

  She laughed. Then her smile disappeared.

  “How long are you in town?”

  He recognized the invitation.

  “Depends. But certainly long enough to take you to dinner. Can I call you?”

  She reached into her purse and took out a card. He looked at it.

  “Shouldn’t this have a logo of a whale or a dolphin on it? My card has a logo of a man in a trench coat.”

  “It does not.”

  “Well, I was thinking about it.”

  Sharon Ross got in her car and drove off with a wave.

  ***

  At about the same time Scarne watched Sharon Ross drive away, Anthony Desiderio arrived at his own home. He was met at his front door by the same man that had greeted Scarne.

  “How’d it go, boss? Good match?”

  “Fag instructor damn near killed me,” Desiderio snarled. “Get me a beer, Lucio. Bring it out to the terrace.”

  He was seated outside looking out at the Gordon River when his beer came.

  “You tell anyone I was at the club?”

  “No, boss. You know better than that. Why?”

  “Guy tracked me down. Private dick. Asked me all sorts of questions about the broad who died after that party last year.”

  Lucio hesitated.

  “What did he look like, boss?”

  Desiderio described Scarne.

  “I think he was here, boss. Said he was from some group that wants to kill off the manatees.”

  Desiderio looked at the man incredulously.

  “And you thought he was legit?”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about manatees boss except they are big and ugly.”

  Desiderio shook his head.

  “Jesus.”

  “But I ran him off. And I didn’t tell him where you were. But he was talking to Yolanda when I got to the door.”

  “Get her. And bring me another beer.”

  A few minutes later a very nervous maid walked over to Desiderio.

  “Yes, Mr. Tony?”

  “Yolanda, that man who was here asking for me, did you tell him where I was?”

  The maid was silent.

  “I’m not mad, Yolanda.” Desiderio’s voice was soothing. “I just want to know. He’s a friend of mine.”

  “I told him you were playing the tennis. At Port Royal.”

  Desiderio smiled.

  “I just wanted to know. Thank you. That will be all.”

  The maid went back into the house.

  “Stupid spic,” Desiderio said. “Lucio, get rid of her.”

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  Lucio started to walk away. Desiderio realized that he might have been misunderstood, especially by a lamebrain who thought it was normal to eradicate the manatees. He certainly didn’t need any more dead wetbacks screwing up his plans.

  “Lucio!”

  “Yes, boss.”

  “I just want you to fire her. Nothing else. Understand? And when you replace her, make sure the new bitch knows to keep her mouth shut. Another fuck-up and you’ll be slee
ping with the goddamn manatees.”

  Desiderio finished his beer and then walked across the broad expanse of lawn that led to the 88-foot Ferretti yacht tied up at his boat dock. It had three bedrooms, one of which was a full-beam master suite with private balcony. The main deck had plush seating and included a hot tub. There was a dining area and bar amidships, and chaise lounges aft, giving charter guests their choice of sun-drenched spaces fore and aft, or shaded seating beneath the hardtop, amidships. With a cruising speed of 24 knots, the all-weather yacht was Desiderio’s pride and joy and was worth almost $6 million.

  Not that he had paid a cent for it. It once belonged to a minor and very unlucky Saudi prince who ran up huge losses at one of the Vegas casinos in which Desiderio’s uncle, Cosimo Stupachi, was a very silent partner. Stupachi agreed to settle the Saudi’s debt in return for the yacht, which he knew was worth much more than the man owed.

  But there was little use for yachts in the desert, so he told Desiderio to go to Miami, where the yacht was based, and find a buyer. Instead, his nephew talked him into moving the yacht to Naples to facilitate a scheme he had devised. Stupachi, normally a hard case when it came to money, had a soft spot for his nephew, who had made serious money for the family in Naples and elsewhere in Southwest Florida buying up depressed real estate after the recent financial crisis and selling when the market rebounded. Desiderio’s real estate prowess also proved useful for laundering the money generated by Stupachi family’s drug, prostitution, bookmaking and loan shark operations nationwide.

  But the old man took some convincing.

  “It’s a crazy idea, Anthony,” Stupachi had argued. “Stick to real estate. You are good at it.”

  “Prices aren’t what they were, Uncle Cosimo,” Desiderio had replied. “Naples is crawling with hedge fund managers. They don’t even negotiate when they buy a property. They’ve driven everything through the roof.”

  “I don’t even know what a fucking hedge fund is,” Stupachi, very much an old-school mobster, said. “I don’t like getting hooked up in things I don’t understand.”

  “It’s Wall Street bullshit, Uncle. You don’t have to understand anything other than there are more than 20 of these guys in my neighborhood, each worth at least a billion bucks. Annually.”

  “Fucking Wall Street. And they say I’m a crook!”

  “I want some of that dough, Cosimo. And this is a way to get it. Trust me. None of them can keep their dicks in their pants.”

  “I don’t know why you can’t use your house or one of the other properties you own.”

  “It’s not the same. These scumbags cream in their pants when they get on a yacht. Besides, houses aren’t as secure.”

  “You sweep for bugs, no?”

  “Of course. But it’s a big place. The Feds are getting better at hiding things. The boat I know is secure.”

  In the end, Stupachi gave his guarded approval.

  “Just don’t fuck it up, Tony. We got a lot of good things going. I don’t want any preoccupazione, any worry. I’m getting too old.”

  But now there was a problem. First the nosy bitch reporter, Mulloy, and now this Scarne.

  Who looked like real trouble.

  CHAPTER 11 - HONEY POT

  The original plan was simple.

  Desiderio’s real estate connections, and obvious wealth, had established him as a major player in Southwest Florida. He was a free spender and generous contributor to the charities around which the social lives of the rich in Naples and Bonita Springs circled. His parties, both in his home and on the yacht, were famous.

  At first, those parties facilitated the real estate activities and provided a steady stream of bedmates.

  (Uncle Cosimo was always chiding Desiderio about his sex life, urging him to “settle down with a nice woman and start a family before your dick gets us all into trouble.” Every time Desiderio went to Vegas, Stupachi set him up with what he considered suitable potential mates, usually the sister or daughter of another crime family with whom the old man hoped to form an alliance. Organized crime in Vegas, and elsewhere, was no longer exclusively run by the Italian Mafia — something that Stupachi realized — so his efforts to land a wife for his favorite nephew did broaden Desiderio’s sexual horizons. He had not come close to finding a wife, but he’d screwed a wide variety of Italian, Russian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Chinese women in the process. Cosimo, fearing that Desiderio might start a mob war with his catting around, eventually stopped his matchmaking.)

  A perfect host, Desiderio had always made sure that his richer guests, especially the hedge fund managers and similar Wall Street types, had plenty of women and drugs to choose from. A few local politicians were added to the mix. Many of the men particularly liked to take their evening’s conquests out on the yacht “to close the deal” as they euphemistically put it. There they could coke up and screw to their hearts’ content on the huge circular bed in the master stateroom.

  It was no big deal to Desiderio. Other than having to change the sheets more frequently than he liked, he was happy to keep his “friends” in his debt. He didn’t even charge them for the drugs, and on the rare occasions when there weren’t enough willing cocktail waitresses or college girls looking for sugar daddies available, he paid for some hookers. As he told Stupachi, “a $15 million real estate deal can pay for a lot of smack and pussy.”

  But with the real estate market slowing down, Desiderio realized that the parties could serve another function. He got the idea when he used the yacht one night himself. A half-drunk cheerleader from Collier University insisted on taking a “selfie” while she gave Desiderio a blow job. He thought she was crazy but didn’t object, since his face wouldn’t be visible. He’d asked the crazy broad if she was worried about anyone seeing her photo and she told him that she doubted anyone would recognize her from what was, basically, the back of her head.

  “I have a lot of these in my collection,” she said.

  Desiderio wondered how much the girl’s father was paying for his little darling’s tuition. Probably around 60 grand a year. Jesus.

  It was the thought of money that enlightened him to another possibility. He was so excited that he sat up, almost gagging the girl.

  “What the fuck,” she said.

  “Sorry, honey, the party’s over. Get dressed.”

  The next day Desiderio made some phone calls and within a week the yacht’s master stateroom had been outfitted with a sophisticated audio/visual system that could record everything said and done in the room. Several high-resolution cameras, including one that looked directly down on the circular bed, covered every angle.

  His first target was a local city councilman who was waffling on a variance that Desiderio needed for an assisted living facility he wanted to develop in North Naples. Given the demographics of Naples, which Desiderio told his uncle had a population whose median age was “dead”, assisted living and hospice-related developments were a gold mine. Like all subsequent targets, the councilman was happily married. But after Desiderio provided the man with a graphic video of his romp with not one, but two, young girls, he cast the deciding vote in favor of the variance. Desiderio knew that vote wouldn’t be the last; the sex video was a gift that kept on giving.

  A natural voyeur, Desiderio filmed all the escapades that occurred in the yacht’s stateroom. He sometimes played them for his girlfriends in his own bedroom, careful to show only those videos that featured people they wouldn’t recognize. But he also investigated the lives of those caught on camera. Those with the most to lose from exposure were individually invited to a private lunch and screening. Married hedge fund managers immediately saw the wisdom of paying Desiderio what was only a fraction of what their outraged wives would win in a divorce settlement. Even those with pre-nuptual agreements usually wanted to avoid publicity.

  “These jerks are basically crooks, anyway,” Desiderio explained to Stupachi. “You know how Wall Street operates. They don’t want to give the S.E.C. or th
e I.R.S. any more reasons to look into their operations. Some of the broads they banged were underage, and if they weren’t, I told them they were. A morals charge is the last thing they need. I hate those nouveau riche fuckers.”

  Desiderio wasn’t being hypocritical. He did despise the youngish millionaires and billionaires and their phony airs. His own family money, while mostly ill-gotten, went back to the Black Hand, as the Mafia was then known, in New Orleans, which was flooded by Italian immigrants escaping political turmoil in Europe during the 1880’s. By 1905, almost half of the French Quarter’s population were Italian-born or second generation Italian-Americans. Irish immigrants who settled heavily in the Esplanade area, the "Irish Channel", referred to the Quarter as “Little Italy” and the criminal elements in the two immigrant communities regularly fought over the spoils available in the wide-open Big Easy. The Stupachi family had since moved its main operations to Las Vegas and Atlantic City, although it kept a few fingers in the New Orleans’ criminal pie through an alliance with, of all people, an Irish mob with which it had long ago buried the hatchet.

  The blackmailed hedge fund managers were more than a source of direct income for the Stupachi family. They also provided another money laundering outlet, one even more secure than real estate, since they understood what would happen if Stupachi “investments” ever lost value. The hedge fund managers Desiderio had on the string assured him that they would sell their own mothers’ positions to cover any potential Stupachi family risks in the market.

  Everything was going great for a while. Even Uncle Cosimo said so. Desiderio expected to be asked to take over more of the family’s operations. Maybe he’d be relocated to Vegas or New York. He decided to give his yacht a name: Vaso di Miele. It was, indeed, a honey pot.

  Then Weatherly and Landon beat up the cocktail waitress and she subsequently died. True, the cops pinned the killing on her boyfriend and the poor bastard got sent away. But Desiderio felt obliged to tell his uncle what happened, just in case there was some blow-back he didn’t anticipate. He expected a dressing down. Instead, after a long pause in the conversation (conducted on throwaway cell phones), the old man simply said “Bring me the video.”