Squeeze Me - Carl Hiaasen Page 0,46
Germaine Bracco’s cell phone and showed him the photo of the stolen car that his idiot brother had texted to him. “It’s the same one they pulled out of the canal, a 2014 Malibu Super Sport. Same busted left front headlight.”
“A Super Sport?”
“Yes, sir.”
The plastic SS logo that Crosby had picked up on the railroad tracks during his field trip with Diego Beltrán had come from a 2009-2014 Malibu Super Sport, according to an auto forensic expert. Crosby said nothing to Angie Armstrong about the logo, the second pearl, or the fact that he’d found both of them near the spot where the python had ended up in the road. He had a pretty good idea of what had happened.
“What’s your background?” he asked Angie.
“I was trained as a veterinarian,” she said, and waited for the curious look she always got. Then:
“After that, I was a wildlife officer, until I went to prison for assaulting a poacher.” Angie checked her watch. “In fact, he’ll be calling shortly to threaten my life. No biggie, happens every night. But, getting back to Mrs. Fitzsimmons, may I summarize? I’d feel better if we went over this stuff one more time. I mean, since you’re not taking notes.”
“Have faith,” said the chief.
“It’s just you seem sort of…well, baffled by the information.”
“The information being that a well-known member of Palm Beach society got strangled and eaten by a giant snake during a charity gala, and no one saw it happen.” Crosby smiled dryly. “I wouldn’t say I was baffled. I would say taken aback.”
On Angie’s own phone was a photo of the Burmese in the banyan tree, the round bulge in its midsection glinting in the camera’s flash. Crosby asked how she killed it.
“Machete.”
“And then you put it in a freezer because…?”
“For the state lab, as required. Obviously Mrs. Fitzsimmons’s body would have been found during the dissection procedure, and the publicity would have been a disaster for the Lipid House. So my guess is that Teabull hired these two geniuses—Bracco and Burns—to steal the dead python from me and get rid of it. They fucked up big-time. The damn thing ended up in the middle of a busy road, and poor Mrs. Fitzsimmons, minus her jewelry, wound up in concrete. The only living victim of this five-star cluster fuck is Diego Beltrán who, thanks to the President, is being crucified for a crime he didn’t do.”
Crosby was nodding though Angie couldn’t tell if he was totally on board, or just being polite.
“Here’s the main thing,” she told him. “At ten o’clock Monday morning, Uric Burns will walk into a bank not far from here thinking he’s about to collect $100,000 for leading your police department to the remains of Mrs. Fitzsimmons. He’s a tall white dude with a freaky dimple in the center of his forehead—I’ll bet there’s a mug shot or two you can pull. Point is he bears no resemblance to the pictures I’ve seen of Diego Beltrán. This is only a suggestion, Jerry, but when Burns shows up in that bank lobby, you should probably have someone waiting to arrest him. Because not only did that maggot burglarize me twice, he stole a dead widow’s jewelry and quite likely killed his own partner so he wouldn’t have to split the money.”
Crosby asked Angie for the name and location of the bank. She wrote it on a napkin.
He said, “The way you tricked Burns, that’s pretty slick. How’d you set it up?”
“Dumb luck. I got his number off his brother’s cell. When I called today, he’d just hung up on somebody at the Fitzsimmons hotline. He assumed it was them calling back, and right away goes off on a tirade about the family jerking him around over the reward money. All I had to do was play along.”
The chief smiled. “Greed makes people stupid. We like that.”
He was looking at Angie in a way that usually would have triggered her letch radar, but he seemed like a decent guy. Nonetheless, she made a point of eyeing his wedding band long enough for him to notice her noticing.
“What happened to your arm?” he asked.
“Didelphis virginiana,” she said. “Possum nailed me.”
“Know what? If I could trade this homicide case for an infected opossum bite, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”
“Once Uric Burns is locked up, you need to call a press conference and let Diego off the hook. Because you know he’s innocent. Right, Jerry?”
In the breast pocket of Crosby’s uniform was