A Reservation for Murder: A Lieutenant Morales Mystery (Lieutenant Morales Mysteries) Read online

  A Reservation for Murder

  A Lieutenant Morales Mystery

  AJ Basinski

  .

  This book is dedicated to my wonderful family,

  who have always been supportive of my work.

  .

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are strictly the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual locales, events and persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by AJ Basinski

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the Copyright Act of 1976 and any amendments thereof, the scanning, uploading and electronic sharing of this book without the permission of the author is unlawful piracy and the theft of the author’s intellectual property.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.”

  Sun-Tzu, Chinese general and military strategist, (400 BC)

  Chapter 1

  When I pulled the white Mustang convertible into the parking lot beside the Bonita Inn, the last thing on my mind was murder. But murder would soon find me, even on this sliver of Paradise called Palm Island.

  The Inn, from the outside, looked nothing like I had envisioned it. It’s like when you have an idea of the way things are supposed to look and when they don’t look that way, you’re a little disappointed. That was the case with the Bonita Inn. From the way Doc Phillips had described it, I thought it would have that “Old Florida” look that people in Florida always seemed to talk about with great reverence. Covered in brown shingles, the Inn looked more like it belonged on Cape Cod or the Hamptons than in Southwest Florida.

  As I parked the Mustang, I was surprised to see two black and white police cruisers sitting at the far end of the lot with their blue and red emergency lights flashing. There was also an ambulance parked in between the two cars. The rear door of the ambulance was wide open and I could see inside a stretcher covered in a white sheet.

  This definitely was not a good beginning for my vacation together with Sun Li.

  I also saw two uniformed police officers standing beside one of the patrol cars. I was watching one of the officers who was writing on a clipboard. I knew immediately that he was someone I had known years before. For the life of me, I just could not remember his name. I quickly looked away when he looked over at me.

  I knew I would remember his name eventually. I always felt that I kept a little file cabinet in the back of my mind full of faces I had seen throughout my whole life. And the names attached to those faces would sometimes spontaneously just come to me out of the blue at the oddest times. Sometimes long after I had seen the face. I knew this would be one of those times. That name would come back to me, I was sure.

  I grabbed our two suitcases out of the small trunk of the Mustang and carried them inside the Inn. Sun Li followed me. Wearing a floppy white Tilley hat and oversized, black-rimmed sun glasses, I thought she looked like a model or maybe even a movie star. I was excited that she had decided to come with me to this little island.

  “Good afternoon,” I said to the receptionist as we approached the front desk in the Inn’s small lobby. The receptionist was a pretty, young blonde with large, tortoise-shell glasses and a sweet smile. She reminded me of a girl I had known years ago in high school back in California. I idly wondered if possibly she could be her daughter, but then quickly dismissed the thought. It was highly unlikely that if that girl had a daughter, she would have ended up here in Southwest Florida. No one goes from California to Florida, except maybe me.

  “I’m Lieutenant Morales,” I said. “I have a reservation for two of your suites for a week.” I always referred to myself as “Lieutenant” when making reservations at a hotel or restaurant. Although I had been busted to Sergeant a year before I had retired from the LAPD, I was convinced that using the title, “Lieutenant,” would always get me the best service and the best rooms. I knew it was probably wrong to claim a title I no longer was entitled to use. But it harmed no one and remember Colonel Sanders? No one questioned him about whether he actually was a “Colonel,” did they?

  “Yes sir, Lieutenant, I have your reservations right here” the young girl said rather excitedly as she tapped on an unseen computer keyboard behind the front desk. “I’ve been a little distracted the last few hours, what with what’s been going on outside.”

  “What is going on outside?” I asked. “I saw two police cars and an ambulance in the parking lot. Must be something serious.”

  “I really don’t know exactly what happened, but about two hours ago, some guy who was fishing off the dock next door came rushing into the Inn and said that he saw a cooler floating in Palm Island Sound, just a few feet away from the dock. He said he waded into the water and pulled it ashore. He thought it probably was somebody’s fishing cooler that had somehow fallen into the water. But when he opened it up, he told me that he saw a body inside, all cut up. ”

  ”A cut up body in a cooler in the water? Did he tell you anything else?”

  “I don’t really know anything more than what I just told you, Lieutenant. I’d say the man was kind of hysterical when he came running in here. Oh yeah, he did say that the body parts were partially wrapped in a black plastic garbage bag. I told him I would call 911, which I did. The police chief and one of his deputies got out here right away. It seemed like no time. The ambulance came a little later. They’ve all been out there ever since.”

  “Did you go out and see anything yourself?’

  “No sir. No offense, sir, but I don’t like dead bodies, particularly ones that have been floating around in the water for God knows how long. I seen a guy drown once and that was it for me. All’s I know is that the fisherman told me that from whet he could see, the body parts looked all swollen and black. He said he couldn’t even tell whether it was a man or a woman.”

  Chapter 2

  I was obviously upset that a dismembered body had been found floating in a cooler near where Sun Li and I would be spending the next few days on vacation. It was very unsettling to me and, I assumed, to
Sun Li as well. A discovery like that so nearby hardly seemed conducive to building a romantic relationship with Sun Li, which was the most important thing on my mind at the time.

  I quickly decided that before we checked in to the Inn I would offer Sun Li the option to go somewhere else to stay on the island or maybe even somewhere off the island. I had seen several pastel-colored cottages in a little village on the main road shortly after we drove onto the island. Several of those cottages had signs outside advertising that they were available for rental by the day and the week. They seemed like a nice alternative to the Inn if Sun Li wanted to leave. I was sure that if I pleaded long enough with the Inn’s owner that I could get my deposit back at the Inn.

  “No, that’s okay,” Sun Li answered when I asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else on the island to stay. “Very beautiful here,” she said. “I like it here very much. No need to go. We should stay here.” She smiled broadly as she said this and that made me feel really good inside. Despite this shaky beginning to our vacation, I was sure now that this trip together would be well worth it.

  As Sun Li was speaking, the cop who I thought that I had recognized standing in the parking lot came into the lobby. He nodded at me as he passed me and Sun Li, but said nothing to us. I looked to see if he was wearing a name tag but he wasn’t, only a silver badge that read “Palm Island Chief of Police.” He also had put on a pair of those aviator sunglasses with silver-coated lenses that some cops seem to favor to try to intimidate people. So it was impossible to see his eyes. I thought that was a little unusual since he was now inside the building. It did occur to me that maybe he did not want me to see who he was. But if that was his intention, he had failed. I did recognize him now that he was close up: it was Ed Shipley. Shipley was a cop I had worked with back in Los Angeles on the LAPD years ago. His name had come back to me as I knew it would, only a lot quicker than usual.

  “Okay,” Shipley said to the receptionist, “I think we’re just about done here for now. We may be back later. I don’t know for sure right now. Where’s the guy who found the body? I need to talk to him some more.”

  “Ed, is that you?” I said to the cop.

  Shipley removed his sunglasses and stared at me for a few seconds before he said anything.

  “Why if it isn’t Mario Morales?” he said in that gravelly voice that always seemed to irritate me when I heard him speak. “What the hell brings you here?”

  I thought that Shipley looked much as he had years ago when we had worked together. But older, of course. Shipley was short, about five foot seven. He had curly black hair that the girls always seemed to like. Except now when he removed his Smokey hat, I could see much of it was gray now. He looked nothing like a cop, which had sometimes come in handy because Shipley had worked a lot of undercover jobs with me and other detectives. I personally always thought he looked a lot like a women’s shoe salesman at Macy’s rather than a police detective.

  “Just here on a little vacation, that’s all,” I said as I shook hands with him.

  “No kidding. Small world, uh?”

  “Yeah, sure is. What’s going on outside?” I was curious about how much he would tell me about what had happened.

  Shipley paused again before answering. Shipley then lowered his voice and said very nonchalantly, “It looks like we have a homicide on our hands here. You remember that murder we investigated when we were working out of Ramparts where the body was all cut up and stuck in a freezer?”

  “Sure, how could I forget that one,” I said.

  Shipley and I had investigated the murder of a CEO of a high tech company in one of the Los Angeles suburbs. The body of the man had been found cut up into little chunks and stowed in a large freezer in his garage, right next to his new, red Chevrolet Corvette. It turned out that his wife had found out that her husband was having an affair with his secretary. Rather than just divorce him, she decided to chop him up for the proceeds from his $5 million insurance policy.

  The woman had told the police officers who had initially investigated that her husband had disappeared one day when he went out to the Seven/Eleven for a loaf of bread and never returned. But about a year later, on one hot summer day, the power failed in her house and the freezer shut down and wouldn’t restart. When the appliance repairman came to fix it, he smelled something and opened the freezer to find Mr. CEO in little pieces the size of beef stew chunks sitting next to the bags of organic peas and boxes of frozen pizzas.

  When Shipley and I came out to the house to arrest her for murdering her husband, she insisted it was all an “accident” and that she had panicked. After the autopsy, it was determined that he had been shot six times in the back. So much for the accident defense.

  “Cases like that one really stick with you,” Shipley said. “That’s sort of what we got here. The body is all dismembered. I’m not even sure how he was killed, but I’m sure it was murder. It’s going to take an autopsy to determine the actual cause of death.”

  The receptionist audibly gasped when she heard Shipley’s description of the state of the body. I thought that she was about ready to faint. I was ready to catch her to keep her from falling if she did. After a few more gasps, she managed to regain her composure as the blood returned to her face which had turned ashen.

  She then pointed to the bar, where a middle-aged man wearing a Boston Red Sox baseball cap and a Red Sox tee shirt was sitting on a stool at the far end of the bar. She told Shipley, “That’s the guy who found the cooler.” The man was sitting by himself, hunched over the bar and nursing a bottle of Blue Moon. I immediately thought that probably that was not his first Blue Moon since he had found the body a few hours before. I know it would not have been my first beer and certainly not my last that day if I had been the one to find the body like that.

  I looked over at Sun Li to see if she had a similar reaction as the receptionist but she had no discernible change of expression. From my experiences while on the LAPD, I had concluded long ago that the Chinese in particular had an infinite capacity to accept death, no matter its form.

  “That’s him,” the receptionist nervously repeated again to Shipley as she pointed to the man at the bar. “That’s him. That’s the guy who told me he found the ice chest with the body inside.”

  Shipley thanked her and went into the bar. He briefly spoke to the man sitting there. After a minute or so of talking with Shipley, the man got off the bar stool, threw a couple of dollars on the bar and the two of them left the bar together.

  As they walked through the Inn’s lobby, Shipley turned and said to me, “Hope to see you around, Mario. I’d like to get together with you before you leave. Maybe get a drink and talk about old times.” Before I could say anything in response, he and the Red Sox fan walked out of the Inn through the front screen door which banged shut behind them. Shipley looked like he was definitely in a hurry to get out of there.

  I looked out the Inn’s front window and saw the two men get into one of the patrol cars I had seen earlier in the parking lot. The car had partially torn decals on both front doors and on the trunk that read, “Palm Island Chief of Police.”

  By then, the ambulance and the other patrol car were gone. Shipley managed to kick up quite a bit of gravel as he quickly pulled out of the parking lot in the aging, black and white Ford Crown Vic. I hoped the flying gravel hadn’t scratched the paint of the rented Mustang as he drove past it. That would be all I needed: more expenses to pay for the damage when I returned the convertible to the Hertz counter back in Miami. I was already way over extended in renting the Mustang, which cost me over a thousand bucks for just one week. But it would all be worth it if it would impress Sun Li. And so far, it seemed to be working.

  “You know, this kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen here,” the blonde receptionist said to me after Shipley had left as she was finishing checking us into the Inn. “This island is like some beautiful, undiscovered paradise.” I could see that her eyes were still as big as those proverb
ial saucers behind her tortoise shell glasses. I had never really known what that expression meant until now when I saw her eyes that day.

  “So, I’ve heard,” I said as I signed the Inn’s registry book for the two of us. “So I’ve been told,” I repeated, even though, not surprisingly, I was already beginning to have my doubts that it was true.

  Chapter 3

  After Sun Li and I had finished checking in at the Inn’s reception desk, we were greeted by the Inn’s bellman, a tall, goateed African-American who appeared to be in his mid-seventies or maybe even older. Despite his apparent age, he looked as strong as that proverbial ox we’ve all heard about.

  The bellman grabbed our suitcases right out of my hands before I could tell him that we would take our bags up to our rooms ourselves. I hated nothing more than having to tip someone for carrying my bags or doing anything else that I could easily do for myself. It also made me feel somehow inadequate to have someone else do anything like that for me. Like some foolish sixteen year old kid on his first date, I particularly wanted to show off to Sun Li how strong I was.

  “My name’s Zeke Chandler,” the bellman said with a grin almost as wide as the Inn’s lobby itself. “I’m the head bellman here. Heck, truth be told, I’m the only bellman here. We just ain’t big enough to have more than one. I’ll be showing you to your rooms. Where you folks from?” Chandler asked as we followed him to the foot of the wooden staircase that led to the Inn’s second floor, where the receptionist had told us that our rooms were located.

  “Miami,” I answered. “I live there in Little Havana, actually, if you’re familiar with that area.”

  “Miami, oh hell, I used to work in Miami at one of them fancy hotels on South Beach. You heard of the Doral Country Club?”

  “Oh sure,” I said. “Who hasn’t heard of the Doral?”