5 A Sporting Murder Page 6

  I found a magazine article about him that painted a picture of a young entrepreneur with a fiery determination to make it big. He had used the knowledge he gained at the hospital firm to create software programs that made life easier for both hospitals and medical practices. He hired the right mix of program developers and marketing pros to quickly build P&S Software into a formidable company.

  Jill and I compared notes. Hays, as we knew, headed the Dollar Deal chain of small retail stores specializing in “everything for a dollar.” He was big in charitable work, served on several corporate boards as well as one of the mayor’s commissions, and owned a piece of a minor league baseball team in another city.

  “Looks like these two are pretty reputable business types,” Jill said. “I’d say we need to concentrate first on Mr. Aregis.”

  “Agreed. We can’t hit him head-on, though. We’ll have to nibble around the edges.”

  “Do you want to try the magazine gimmick?”

  It was something we’d used before. I would pose as a magazine writer and interview the subject for a background piece. “Might work. He’s fairly new in town. He won’t likely know me.”

  “What about that picture of you Wes Knight put in the paper after the Marathon case?”

  Notoriety wasn’t always a good thing. “You have a point. I guess that leaves it up to you, babe. Think you can handle it?”

  She gave me a few bars from Annie Get Your Gun. “Anything you can do I can do better.”

  “Okay, it’s all yours.”

  She called Coastal Capital Ventures on her cell phone, which didn’t show her name, and identified herself as a contributing writer for Sporting World Magazine. It sounded close enough to the real thing to fool most people. She gave me the high sign, meaning they were putting her through to Louie Aregis.

  I got on the office phone and called Channel 4, the local NBC affiliate, asked to speak to the sports director, Rod Jenson. On hearing the mellow voice I associated with a square-jawed smiling face on the nightly news, I introduced myself and asked if we might get an appointment to chat with him for a few minutes.

  “We have a client with an interest in the professional sports scene,” I said. “I hoped you might be able to give us a little background on how things work.”

  “Sure. Be happy to help anyway I can.”

  He wouldn’t have time for us today but agreed to a meeting tomorrow.

  Jill looked across from her desk as I put down the phone. “Worked like a charm,” she said. “I’m interviewing Aregis at nine o’clock in the morning.”

  “We need to craft some questions that sound innocuous but might give us an insight into what’s going on with this deal,” I said.

  “You’re the interrogator. Tell me what to ask and I’ll make notes.”

  “Let’s save that for tonight. I need to run over to the spy shop and pick up our surveillance gear. Sarge said he’d have it all ready this morning.”

  We had a tricky surveillance job coming up next week, and I had ordered a bunch of new equipment the fee would pay for. The store was located on Lebanon Road not far from our office.

  “Don’t tarry,” Jill said. “We need to leave soon for our interview with Gordon Franklin.”

  I cut through Andrew Jackson Parkway and made it in no more than five minutes. The sign over the door of the narrow shop said Covert Security. I had run across the place a few months back while looking for a small, unobtrusive camera. The owner, a retired Special Forces master sergeant, looked up when I walked in.

  “Hey, Colonel. Got all your stuff right here,” he said, showing his usual lop-sided grin. He was a little shorter than me but with bulging, muscular arms. He wore a baseball cap with SOX across the front.

  “Morning, Sarge,” I said. “I didn’t know you were a Chicago fan.”

  “Just trying out my newest gadget.” He pulled off the cap and turned it upside down. “This little jewel is a camera and video recorder. Holds up to four hours. The lens looks out through the O in SOX. Neat, huh?”

  I looked it over. “They get stuff any smaller and you can hide it in your eye teeth.”

  He chuckled. “I think the CIA already does that.”

  He spread the McKenzie Investigations equipment on the counter: a keychain voice recorder/transmitter, a small receiver that would fit in your pocket, a receiver that hooked over your ear like a Bluetooth phone, and a ballpoint pen voice recorder.

  “They’ve all got instructions with them,” Sarge said. “Let me know if you have any problems.”

  I gathered up all our surveillance goodies and headed back to the office. When I got there, Jill handed me a slip of paper.

  “Colonel Grigsby, wants you to call him,” she said.

  When I reached my old commander, I got the news I expected.

  “You’re still sharp as ever, Greg,” he said. “That must have been Izzy you saw. They told me he was released last week, presumably headed back to Louisville.”

  “He got fifteen years, didn’t he?” I couldn’t remember all the crooks I’d sent up, but this was one of those special cases.

  “Right, for transporting and selling cocaine, assault, conspiracy to commit murder, and a variety of other charges. And I’m sure you recall how unhappy he was that you nailed him. They should have notified me the moment they turned him loose.”

  “Thanks. Did you get any info about his prison record?”

  “Not good. He was a troublemaker. They said he associated with other former drug dealers. I suspect he’ll be right back into it.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “He was a smart operator.”

  “Right,” Colonel Grigsby said. “You’d better watch your backside.”

  Chapter 11

  When I told Jill what I had learned about Izzy Isabell, she got up from her desk, stared at me, folded her arms, and asked, “Could that have been him lurking around on our street last night?”

  “I hardly think so. I wouldn’t expect Izzy to be driving an expensive SUV.”

  She leaned against the desk. “If I remember correctly, you were never able to find what he’d done with his money.”

  “He did a good job of hiding it, all right. What took us so long to find him was he didn’t live beyond the lifestyle of a young lieutenant. If it’s been waiting for him all these years, he should have plenty of cash to spend. But he was driving a Ford pickup when I saw him. I’d say that’s more his speed.”

  “Well, I don’t like the idea of his being in Nashville.”

  Neither did I, and I knew what I needed to do as soon as we got back from our visit with Gordon Franklin.

  The accounting firm of Franklin, Gretchen and Silverman occupied a lavish suite in a suburban office building. Lavish in terms of size, not in demeanor. The dark-paneled walls, mahogany desks and subdued lighting rivaled the staid look of an old bank lobby. I’d always heard that number crunchers were a conservative lot.

  A prim, white-haired secretary ushered Jill and me into a large room with all the pizzaz of the offices I had occupied in the Air Force. A signed photo of the Republican president and a few patriotic pictures adorned the walls, such as the Statue of Liberty and the flag-raising on Mount Suribachi. Unlike my typical clutter, the dark wood desk held neat stacks of spreadsheets. A paperweight atop one consisted of a small wood block emblazoned with a round symbol that appeared to be a globe bearing “MARS” in large letters. The first thing to come to mind was NASA’s program to continue exploration of the red planet. I’d recently read about plans to launch a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter next year. I wondered what connection Franklin might have to NASA.

  He stood behind his desk, a short, stocky man dressed in a gray business suit with a red, white, and blue-striped tie. A neatly folded kerchief protruded from the breast pocket. I had seen my share of dull expressions, but this one was a classic. As Brad Smotherman had suggested, I suspected he found little of interest beyond those neat rows of figures on a sheet of paper. Except for ice hockey, of co
urse. He walked with a slight limp as he came around to shake hands.

  “Nice to meet you,” Franklin said, though it seemed only a formality. “I understand you’ve already talked to Brad Smotherman.”

  “We have,” I said. “He filled us in on the background, but we thought it best to see if you might be able to add anything.”

  “Have a seat.” He indicated straight-backed wooden chairs in front of his desk. “I’m not sure I have anything to add, though.”

  After being seated, I looked across at him. “I was hoping you might know something about Arnold Wechsel.”

  His eyes widened. “Wechsel? Wasn’t that the young man you found at that garage? I’d never heard of him until Brad told me about it yesterday. I read the story in the newspaper. I thought you probably knew him.”

  “I did know him, but I wasn’t aware that he had any connection to this NBA deal, other than what he said when he asked me to meet him.”

  “Didn’t he say why he wanted to talk to you?”

  “No specifics. I suspect it involved those rumors Bradley Smotherman mentioned. Have you heard anything along that line? A hint of something shifty that might be going on?”

  “Sorry.” He shook his head. “I don’t travel in the same circles as Brad and Mack. I wasn’t privy to any of that stuff.”

  “Are you familiar with the three men who are spearheading the effort, Louie Aregis, Howard Hays, and Fred Ricketts?”

  “I don’t know any of them personally. I’m familiar with their reputations, except for this Aregis fellow. He’s new around town.”

  “What sort of things is Protect Our Preds cooking up to counter the threat from the basketball competition?”

  He gave a brief shake of his head. “I left all that up to Brad and Mack. I agreed to help out with the financing, but with tax season coming up, I’m too busy to get involved in all those details.”

  “As an accountant, you must have some idea of how an NBA team would affect the Predators financially.”

  “Of course. There’s around a million and a half people in the fourteen-county statistical area surrounding Nashville. The Titans’ stadium has been sold out since the first game. The Predators have struggled, but we’re holding our own. In my opinion, adding a basketball team to the mix would be disastrous.”

  “So what can you do to prevent that from happening?”

  Franklin folded his hands and looked down at them for a moment. “Frankly, that’s out of my area of expertise.”

  The interview seemed to be going nowhere until Jill switched the conversation to a more chatty note. “How did you become such an avid hockey fan, Mr. Franklin?”

  He turned his high-back leather executive chair to face her, displaying a smile for the first time. “I’d never seen a big league professional hockey game until I joined the Marines and was sent to Camp Pendleton, California. I got to watch a few L.A. Kings’ games and was hooked. After I left the service, I studied accounting in Boston and became a Bruins fan.”

  “Are you originally from Nashville?” Jill asked.

  “Yes. I grew up here, but that was in the sixties. The only ice hockey back then was the Dixie Flyers. The Municipal Auditorium ice was a small, cramped rink. I remember hearing that in the early days the team traveled to out-of-town games in a former school bus.”

  “Did you go to any of their games?” I asked.

  “A few, but it was nothing like this. I played hockey as a kid, but that was on roller skates out in the street. We used to flatten a tin can to use as a puck. My dad ran a Rexall drugstore out Hillsboro Road.”

  Jill turned to me. “I think I patronized that drugstore. You remember I lived out that way.”

  Her dad, who died a few years after we married, was a highly successful life insurance agent. They lived in a fancy area that gave me a real shock the first time I visited her large fieldstone home. It looked like a mansion to me, the son of a St. Louis master brewer and an English teacher.

  “I’m retired Air Force,” I said. “How long were you in the Marines?”

  “Three years. I was injured in Vietnam and got out when I came back. That newspaper story about Wechsel mentioned he was from Germany. Have you learned anything about him from over there?”

  “His uncle is a former colleague of mine,” I said. “We’re committed to tracking down who’s responsible for Arnold Wechsel’s death. Our main effort, though, is to find out what’s behind this so-called rumor, which doesn’t sound like a rumor at all. We plan to look deeper into the NBA backers, starting with Louie Aregis. We have one good lead we hope will pay off.”

  I decided not to go into detail. Although the CPA was one of Protect Our Preds’ major benefactors, Terry Tremont had said Bradley Smotherman was the official client responsible for our being hired. My law enforcement experience had taught me that people tended to exaggerate or misinterpret information frequently. Spreading around too much about a case could quickly complicate matters.

  When we left a short time later, Jill took me to task over what I had said. She gave me a squinty eye and dropped her voice to a skeptical tone. “What’s that good lead we’re expecting to pay off, dear?”

  “I’m inclined to go with a mother’s intuition,” I said. “I think the gambling angle involving Arnold Wechsel is worth digging into a lot more deeply.”

  At the moment, however, I had no idea where to turn to pursue that possibility.

  Chapter 12

  Nashville drivers handle winter weather in one of two ways. They either dash madly like mail carriers facing a deadline to deliver despite rain or snow or heat or gloom of night, or they creep along as though the streets were glazed over. On the way back to the office, we navigated a perilous path between both types as a mixture of rain and sleet pelted the windshield. Our only mad dashing came when we parked a couple of rows out from the small family restaurant at the opposite end of the shopping center.

  “So what are the sleuths eating today?” asked Tillie, our usual waitress, or female server as my PC friends would say. A yellow pencil appeared from the graying hair above her ear. Round spectacles joined it in a vertical position, as if she had eyes in the top of her head. I suspected she did. She missed little.

  “I’ll have that nice fruit salad you’ve been pushing lately,” Jill said. “I don’t know where you’re getting the fruit this time of year, but it seems really fresh.”

  “The boss has a secret source at the Farmer’s Market. I think it’s a Florida farmer.” Tillie nodded her head at me. “What about the old guy?”

  I gave her the eye rolling routine. “The old guy would like a nice, juicy steak, but he’ll settle for a nice, fresh fruit salad.”

  “He’s on his good behavior these days,” Jill said, smiling.

  As the waitress flounced off to the kitchen, I gave Jill a look. “Thanks for that vote of confidence.”

  “It’s true. I don’t believe you’ve gained a pound lately. Of course, you haven’t lost one, either.”

  She kept me on a short leash, but her magical touch made our low-fat, low-calorie dishes tasty.

  “Enough chit-chat, babe,” I said, “you’re still on the clock. What did you think of Gordon Franklin?”

  “I have a hard time picturing that Mr. Milquetoast as a Marine.”

  “That limp could’ve been service-connected.”

  “He didn’t say he was wounded. I’ll bet he broke his leg when he tripped over his calculator.”

  “That’s not being very charitable,” I said, emphasizing it with a tsk tsk.

  Tillie appeared with our coffee and poured. We didn’t need to ask.

  Jill took a tentative sip. “Good and hot.”

  “Always is here. Not like Brother Gordon. He’s a cool customer. I got the impression he wasn’t all that concerned about the possibility of skullduggery among the NBA people.”

  “Certainly not as much as Smotherman.”

  “Yeah. And he doesn’t call his firm Puck and Stick Accountants,
either.”

  “Booo.” She twisted her nose.

  “He livened up a bit when you got him talking about hockey, though.”

  “He’d have to be a big fan to put up the kind of money Terry was talking about.”

  “Right. But I have a feeling he’s too busy crunching numbers to be of much help to us.”

  I put the subject on hold when our fresh fruit salads arrived.

  Back at the office, I got on the phone to Louisville while Jill updated the case file on Preds vs. NBA. I reached Lieutenant Dobyns at the police department and explained that I was a retired OSI agent in Nashville who had prosecuted a drug dealer/courier from Louisville years ago. I told him about spotting Izzy Isabell in Nashville and asked if they had received any information regarding him since his release from prison.

  “I’m not aware of anything,” he said, “but I can check it out. Do you have a contact in the Nashville Police Department?”

  “Homicide Detective Phil Adamson,” I said.

  “I know Adamson. He did a seminar here a couple of years ago. I’m sort of constrained by policy from providing information except through another police agency.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Just call Phil if you come up with anything.”

  I checked in with Phil and told him about the conversation.

  “You think this guy is still on your case after all these years?” he asked.

  “It doesn’t sound like he’s changed. Worse, if anything.”

  “Okay. I’ll let you know if I hear from Louisville.”

  With that out of the way, we sat around Jill’s desk for a strategy session to prepare her for the interview with Aregis tomorrow morning.