Archives
"Doc"
"A House Divided"
"Kayaker"
A Francie LeVillard Mystery
Episode I
Welcome to a new Francie LeVillard story at here at the
renowned Monterey Mystery.com. It’s called "Kayaker" and it’s a
quickie – only two parts. But you’ll have to wait until the very
end of the second part to find out what happened to her
marvelous bait. But first, Episode I of "Kayaker."
* * * * *
The story seemed simple enough, but when you’ve been reading
news items professionally for as long as Francie LeVillard has – for
a decade as a reporter and almost as many years as a consulting
detective-slash-news junkie – you can get a bit jaded. To the
extent that sometimes she smells a rat when there isn’t one. Or
sometimes there is, but it’s not her case to solve. Only three
out of five murders in the U.S. are solved, at least to the
satisfaction of law enforcement. That’s according to the FBI. The cops don’t always get their man, at least not the right
one, or woman.
The fact is, or should it be said that the best estimates
are, that fifty thousand or more Americans are in prison for
crimes they didn’t commit. Most of those are not for capital
crimes, and many people copped a plea for a crime or crimes they
did not commit in order to pull a shorter sentence. Right, you
say, at least they’re behind bars. Sigh, yes, for the time
being. However, California’s recidivism rate is 67%.
But that’s not what this story is about. It’s more about a
couple of people who had committed crimes, or at least
transgressions, and had done no time.
It started with this news squib Francie saw online. It was
about a call to 911 from a guy saying he was kayaking off the
Malibu coast and was suffering chest pains. A patrol boat went
out to look, arriving a half-hour after the call. They found an
overturned kayak. They found a life vest. On shore the company
that had rented the kayak said it was theirs and they hadn’t
seen the guy who rented it. In their parking lot was a car
belonging to that guy. Authorities over flew the area a couple
of times and sent some trekkers to walk the area beaches. They
didn’t find a body. They didn’t find anything related to the man
or the call.
As noted, it all seemed simple enough. The cops learned that
the missing kayaker was 55 years old. A check with his doctor
said the guy's cardio-vascular system hadn’t been in great shape.
And that’s where the investigation stopped. A week went by, and
two, and still no body showed up, and they usually do in that
area of the Southern California coast; missing swimmers,
surfers, victims of boating accidents, and victims of more
deliberate activities.
This guy’s death could have been quickly written off as the
result of a heart attack and drowning. The faster police can
clear a case – especially when it involves a death – the sooner
they can go on to the backlog of obvious crime cases that has
grown ever larger as state and local budget cuts have reduced
the resources necessary to tackle actual crimes. As opposed to
misadventure or accident.
But in this case, there were a couple of problems that made
the lead investigator reluctant to move the folder from his desk
to the "Closed" file drawer. The first was that there was no
body. Not a stopper by itself, but then there was the fact that
this guy was an experienced kayaker. It was certainly plausible
that he could have tipped the boat, but why would his body have
fallen out? If you’ve ever gone kayaking you know that you are
semi-fastened in with a skirt designed to keep water out. Also,
why he would he have removed his life vest?
There had been no other boaters reported in the area; no
reports of the man having been seen by other kayakers. This was
not surprising, considering that he had paddled up the coast a
bit to a cove that was surrounded by rocks and inaccessible
except by boats without a keel, like a kayak or a canoe. There
was no question about the voice. The police played the 911
recording for Sissy Langdale, the man’s wife – she wailed loudly
-- and his doctor, who acknowledged that it was the voice of his
(former) patient. Also, computers pinpointed the origin of the
call to that cove.
The lead investigator, confronted by a stressed bureaucrat
who wanted to know why the open file hadn’t become a closed
filed, relented as far as pushing it to a back corner of his
desk, atop a dozen other such files that he thought should have
time to percolate.
Why was Francie – sitting comfortably in her lovely little
house hundreds of miles up the same Pacific coast, south of
Monterey – interested, let alone doubtful about the obvious?
Because it was too pat. Also, she knew of this man and his wife.
The daughter of a college friend of hers had been ripped off in
a real estate deal, and these two miscreants had been the
rippers. They owned a real estate company, and the fine print in
their custom contracts, which the young woman had unwittingly
signed, without understanding it, had cost her the down payment she’d made on a starter
home.
The details weren’t important; such shenanigans were epidemic
during the building of the housing bubble. While there were a
zillion liar loans written on both sides of the desk, there were
also plenty of honest people who were conned in all the hurly
burly. What had happened to her friend’s daughter had been
legal, but not moral. Her father had been told by two attorneys
that it was an unwinnable case. Then he had called Francie. She
had made a few phone calls and found out that the pair had
played fast and loose with a number of clients, some of whom had
tried to sue. The one person who had won had come away with only
a fraction of the money she had lost. Plus, Francie found out
that there had been a number of complaints to the state and
county real estate boards, but nothing had come of them. She had
reported all of this to her friend, suggesting, only
half-joking, that they should hire a couple of thugs to beat
them soundly, although that wouldn’t get their money back.
So when she read the story about Cedric Langdale, she didn’t
feel any of the Donne-esque any man’s death diminishes me
stuff. Her first thought was that he had been murdered by one of
his financial victims. When she read deeper into the details,
she was sure that it was a staged event, and that Langdale was
alive. The fact that his wife had made a scene when she ID’d his
voice tickled that special place in the back of her brain that
said something wasn’t kosher. She couldn’t explain how it works,
but those red flags had never been wrong. Francie was convinced
that the wife was in on the game.
She did some further poking around the couple’s financial
history – something the cops didn’t have the time or inclination
to do – and found that they had been on the downslope for some
time. So had been a lot of people in the real estate business,
what with the collapse in the housing market, but there were
also some interesting withdrawals from their personal bank
accounts, and her guess was that they had gone into cash and
they had moved it somewhere offshore.
(You might wonder how Francie, as a private consulting
detective, would have access to their bank accounts. The fact
was that she had worked closely with state, local and even
federal law enforcement on a number of cases. She had tipped
them off several times on important matters that ranged from
gang activities to foreign nationals trying to smuggle nuclear
triggers into the United States. Her contributions had earned
her their cooperation, so when she needed some information, they
let her have access, because they knew she was on their side.)
Her next guess was that Langdale had had a sizeable insurance
policy on his life, and that turned out to be true. Seven
figures, in fact. It wasn’t immediately clear if he’d had an
accidental death rider but later that turned out to be in an
addendum to the policy. It seemed like too many people had seen
Fred and Barbara in Double Indemnity.
Francie had seen too many fake accidents to be surprised any
more. With Langdale, the newly-late missus would probably have
to wait for the body to be not found for a month before the
insurance company would fork out the second million. Considering
the man’s health – presuming the doctor had told the cops the
truth – the premium must have been sizeable, but if this was a
scam, they surely viewed it as a reasonable investment.
Knowing what she did about these two from her earlier
investigation, her sense was that they were the impatient and
arrogant type; that they had planned this scheme out together
for the purpose of bankrupting out of their investments and then
starting over with a new, ill-begotten wad and new identities
and elsewhere. She also had an idea where they might resurface –
Cozumel. She had learned from another investigator who’d gone
after them on a real estate mess, to no avail, that they had
been to the resort island off of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula a
number of times before. Apparently he fashioned himself to be a
diver, and she loved the silver jewelry.
Realizing that they had likely hatched their plans based on a
few other movies as well, Francie decided they must have known
that he would have to leave the area immediately, and with a new
identity he had crossed the border and established himself in
Mexico. The, um, widow would remain in the Los Angeles area for
an appropriate period of time; you know, to mourn and await the
check from the insurance company for the never-recovered body.
And then she might depart with only a few essentials; two
million bucks could cover a lot of bills, before they launched
on a new scam.
Francie was thinking they would have planned to wait for four
weeks, since the missus couldn’t push the insurance company any
faster. She also found it hard to imagine that she would leave,
even for a visit, any sooner than two weeks. Having tiptoed
around legalities for years and years, they would be at least a
tad concerned that the cops might be suspicious, and they
wouldn’t want to be too obvious. Drowning her sorrows in
margaritas wasn’t an image that would fly very far with
suspicious cops.
Maybe it was because she was her own boss and worked alone, but Francie believed
that everything one can enjoy can be written off, or better yet,
paid for by a client. So she called her college friend and told
him she was going after the couple who had flimflammed his
daughter, but to keep it under his hat. He was delighted and
without her asking, he sent her a check that more than covered
her expenses. This wasn’t a mercenary effort on her part.
Francie’s plan entailed getting back what his daughter had lost.
* * * * *
What’s the plan? Does it have a chance of working? Find out
in the next and final part of "Kayaker" when Episode II is
posted on June 15th.
