Killer Summer

CHAPTER 8

            Jaylow only had one name.  She had started life as Jayne Lowrance Smith, named by her father after his favorite actress, Jayne Mansfield, and his prized fishfinder/depthsounder. When she was in her early twenties she married Evander Cadwallader Smith, a man of few accomplishments whose given names were meant by his parents to make up for his rather pedestrian surname.

            Thus, our future commissioner became Jayne Lowrance Smith-Smith. After Evander ran off with his polo pony’s groom, Jaylow married Henderson Smyth, and was referred to as Mrs. Smith-Smith-Smyth. When Henderson shuffled off this mortal coil, his widow decided to get into politics and went to court to legally shorten her name to Jaylow. Not only did this fit better on the ballot, but it was easier to squeeze it onto the manifest for the annual trip to the Hurricane conference in Maui.

            Jaylow was elected and immediately set out to do something about the traffic on Gulf of Mexico Drive. She briefly considered reviving Small Fry’s idea of toll booths, but when a consultant, at the bargain price of $50,000, told her that she couldn’t put toll booths on state owned roads she got the commission to vote for a survey to find out how to deal with the traffic.

            The consultants set up road blocks, stopping every third car to ask where the occupants were going. They didn’t bother with Fords and Chevrolets because they assumed these were shortcutters. After three of the consultants were maimed by the passengers of a church bus delayed on their journey to the bingo parlor in Tampa, the road blocks were removed, and the study was completed by assumptions. They just assumed that every third car was a shortcutter and further assumed that the bridge tender on the Cortez Bridge liked to mess with Longboaters’ heads by opening his bridge every twenty minutes to slow their travel to and from the Winn-Dixie store on Cortez Rd.

            The town paid the consultants another $50,000 and put the report in the shredder. The plan was to do another survey the next year.

            I had gotten out of bed, and bleary eyed, drove to the crime scene to meet the chief. “Any witnesses?” I asked him.

            He sighed. “Just Logan Hamilton. He was out walking his cat and had stopped to smoke a cigarette when somebody stuffed the traffic cone on Jaylow’s head.”

            “Logan needs to quit smoking,” I said. “Did he see anything?”

            “Jaylow was walking down the sidewalk when a Lexus pulled up next to her, and somebody leaned out the driver’s side window and stuffed the cone on her. Logan ran over and tried to get the cone off Jaylow, but apparently she resisted. Kept screaming about her new hairdo. Then she stopped. Ran out of air, I guess.”

            “I don’t suppose Logan got a tag number.”

            “No, but he did say it was one of those "Save the Turtles" tags they’re selling now.”

            “That’ll narrow it down some. Most of the real estate ladies don’t like the turtles. They cause too many restrictions on the use of beach condos.”

            “Yeah, but there’s been a split in the turtle ladies organization.”

            “I haven’t heard about that.”

            “Some of them wanted to start a "Save the Love Bugs" campaign, and others thought they ought to just focus on the turtles. I’m told the meetings got a little testy. Jaylow took the side of the love bug people.”

            “I guess we’re narrowing down our search. We have a real estate lady who drives a Lexus and loves turtles. It’s more than we had this morning.”

            “Or,” said Charley Goins, who had sidled up to the chief, “it’s a terrorist masquerading as a real estate lady. They’re pretty slick, you know. And besides, it’s a scientific fact that love bugs were introduced into Florida by the terrorists to ruin the paint on everybody’s cars.”

            “Well,” the chief said, “if that’s true, why would they  want to get rid of somebody who was in favor of saving the little rascals?”

            “Because they’re devious,” said Charlie. “They’re trying to throw us off. Besides, turtle poop is a bigger danger to us than the love bugs.”

            Each of the hundred or so specialty licence plates issued in Florida has a unique numbering system. I could run a computer search of all Lexuses on Longboat Key with the numbering system of the "Save the Turtles" plate. I could then cross check this with the real estate licensees who live on Longboat and that should narrow the search even more.

            The chief promised to have one of his officers get the names and addresses of all Longboaters who owned a Lexus with a turtle tag and email it to me.  I was tired, it was almost two in the morning and I figured I could do the computer search after breakfast. I went back home to bed. 

            The next morning I fired up my computer and found the promised list in my email. I called the Florida Real Estate Commission and was put on hold for forty-five minutes. I spent the time looking over the list of Lexus owners, but nothing popped out at me. Finally, a woman with an Indian accent answered the phone. I asked if she was with FREC, and she said she was. I asked if she were located in Tallahassee, and she said she couldn’t tell me that for security reasons. I asked to speak to her supervisor, and after another thirty minutes on hold, a man with an Indian accent answered. I was pretty sure I was talking to India.

            “What took you so long?” I asked.

            “I was on the phone with the Crime Lab in Sarasota.”

            “Were you able to help them?”

            “Not yet.  I put them on hold to talk to you.”

            I explained that I was a policeman in Longboat Key and needed a list of the real estate license holders who lived on the island. “Have you filled out the form?” he asked.

            “What form?”

            “You must fill out a form to get that information. If you will write to FREC in Tallahassee, they will send you a form in a month or so, and you fill out the form and send it back. They will send it to us, and we will process it. We can probably get you the information by late summer.”

            “Are you in Tallahassee?” I asked.

            “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. Security, you know.”

            I hung up and called the Longboat Key Chamber of Commerce. Every real estate person on the island was a member. The Chamber threw a party once a month and offered free food and booze to members. Real estate people will always show up for free food and booze, and I knew the Chamber kept a list of their attendees. All I had to do was join the Chamber and I could get a copy of the real estate members.

            I headed for the Chamber building which occupied a space that had once housed a bank. The bank had been forced off the key because it would not pay any more than four percent interest on CDs. Some people from the south end of Longboat had threatened to burn the place down, so the bank moved to Holmes Beach where four percent was considered adequate.

            I paid my two dollar annual membership dues and was handed the list of members broken down into job categories. The largest category by far was real estate sales. I would have to manually cross check this list with the one from the police department, but for the first time I felt as if I were closing in on a suspect. 

            My phone rang. The chief.  “Commissioner Bogardus is dead.”

            “How?”

            “Clawed to death by wild stone crabs.”