Synopsis

Finding a body mutilated by an alligator in the hole dug for your swimming pool can change your plans. Dr. Dan Trix was hired to conduct a management audit in exchange for a big paycheck and a deep discount on a home in a country club development. Then a local real estate economist is found shot in his office. Trix, Elaine and his war buddy Lester signed the economist’s guest book that day. Detective Rodriquez is convinced that all this is not just a coincidence. Trix suspects there is more at play than a management audit. To test that suspicion, he and Lester will have to confront a Lithuanian who learned his management style from Russians who held a gun to his head.

Chapter 1.

“It’s the free puppy protocol. If people get something for free, it has little value. Payment is a sacrifice. Sacrifice engenders loyalty. Give away puppies and they’ll be abandoned in the park the first time they poop on the carpet. Sell that puppy for five dollars and the new parents will feel a sense of ownership, a connection. Funny how money does that,” I said in an annoyingly pompous fashion. I was annoyed that he would ask me to do this for free. Hoped to annoy him in return.

“That’s very interesting,” he said. The guy wore a stiff white shirt with his initials on French cuffs and a blue Hermes tie dotted with little green owls. The bottom end of the tie had flipped over. I could see the label. The cuff links were gold sandhill cranes.

“Interesting and true. You can bet on it,” I replied.

He held my embossed business card in his left hand and snapped it with his right index finger like he was considering whether or not to call the bet. “Dr. Trix, perhaps we could arrive at an understanding,” he said, his chin slightly raised.

“Sounds like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939,” I said sounding insufferably haughty.

He turned his head a few degrees.

“Non-aggression pact between Russia and Germany. An understanding. It didn’t work,” I said.

I think the squint in his eyes meant, “What in the hell are you talking about?”

He leaned forward, his elbows on a black walnut desk that sat on a black walnut floor that nicely displayed black leather and chrome chairs, in one of which I sat.

“Let’s try this another way. I need an outside consultant. I need a management audit. Broken Shore is, depending on how you measure it, either the biggest or one of the biggest developers in Florida. For you to have us on your resume would bring you work and revenue such that you could choose your projects to match your lifestyle. Our gift to you is letting you put your name on the project.” The guy wore rimless wire frame glasses. His thin blonde hair was so fine and closely cropped that he appeared bald.

“Let’s try this another way,” I said. “You need an outside consultant. You need a management audit. Broken Shore is, depending on how you measure it, either the biggest or one of the biggest developers in Florida. For you to have me on your resume would bring you work and revenue such that you could choose your projects to match your lifestyle. My gift to you is letting you put my name on the project.” I paused. “For a price.”

He leaned back in his swivel chair and crossed his legs. Initialed socks.

“You’re very good,” he said with a smile. It was a smile the same way a vision slit in a combat tank is a smile.

“I’ve been told that,” I said with a smile. The same smile that Brad Pitt used to entrap Angelina. Or so it seemed to me.

He snapped my card, looked at it, turned it over. “Not much of a business card.”

“It’s a calling card not a Facebook page.”

“You have a phone number?” he asked, with a don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you tone.

“That’s how you reached me.”

“That’s how my administrative assistant reached you. Where are you staying? Is this a short vacation?”

I had wandered into the Broken Shore sales office to look at the diorama of a community that had been recommended; Black Forest Country Club, it was called. Every mini-community within the club was named as a tribute to a tree or a forest or wood. One of the developers had been enraptured with the rain forest when he was on a barge trip on the Amazon. Somehow it gave him a sense of proximity and comfort to name the communities in the development as an echo of that experience; Pepper Tree Estates, Golden Pine Gardens, Black Oak Lanes, Swaying Palm Drive, Twisted Pine Circle, Shady Woods Lane. You get the idea.

The friendly but insistent receptionist required my name and number before I could wander. She was one of those academically displaced persons. She had a master’s degree in marketing, had taken this job while in school, and got enough pay raises over time that it was easier to be a first class receptionist in a hot-damn organization than an expendable marketer in a not-for-profit. She also recognized my name. I learned all this because she was a warm and chatty as she guided me around the showroom. With legs like that they should buy her a glass desk. That’s just good business.

“I’m renting in Black Forest Park,” I said.

“Our community bylaws require that rentals be for no less than thirty days,” he added, answering his second question.

“Oops,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. It was obvious he wasn’t an outdoor guy. He hadn’t squinted in the sun, burned the back of his neck or had skin crud removed from his cheeks. Lamplight is not terribly destructive.

“I think we can overlook that in this case, Dr. Trix.”

He didn’t have a nameplate on the front of his desk and I hadn’t quite gotten the guy’s name. Brand, or Bland. Something like that. “That’s thoughtful. Thank you.”

“Let me give this some thought. I’m quite certain we can come to an arrangement. I’ll be in touch.”

He stood and shook my hand. I was six feet and with my brown hair wet, one hundred and ninety pounds. If he stood on a couple bricks, we’d be eye to eye. He had the hands of a guy who knew what a hammer looked like but had never actually held one.

As soon as I was out of his office, the administrative assistant, whom I had mistaken as the receptionist, was beside me. She hadn’t been behind her desk when I arrived. “Nice to see you again, Dr. Trix.”

“My pleasure, Rebekka,” I said not glibly, as I glanced at her nametag. “I only use the honorific if I’m trying to talk to a physician.”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t,” she said. “You deserve the respect. Is there anything I can show you? Would pamphlets be helpful?”

“Lot prices and some model home choices and prices would be interesting. I forgot to ask …” and here I took a guess, “Mr. Bland for that info.”

“How did you know that?”

“Know what?”

She leaned a little closer. Something floral. Maybe lilac. “How did you know that Mr. Rand’s nickname is Mr. Bland?” she said in a quiet, conspiratorial tone. We were buddies.

“I’m a doctor, remember. I know many things.”

She had tiny Klieg lights behind ten-carat emerald irises. “Were you as irreverent when you were teaching?”

Before I completed my dark and bumpy transition from married, distinguished, research-assistant rich, endowed chair, oft-published and quoted, professorship at the University of Nebraska, to a damp stone cottage in the Cotswolds in England where I moped and mulled the causality of my divorce, became nearly translucent from lack of sun, lost weight because of an intolerance for deep fried everything, identified with folk songs about sailors lost at sea and miners never found in cave-ins, to my current resurrection as management consultant with embossed calling card, name recognition, and a lady friend insistent that commitment is the cement of any relationship, before all that I was college teacher. What a long strange trip it’s been.

“Irrelevant, I’d say.”

“The brochures are in my desk.”

She fetched them, placed them in a nice folder, the cover of which featured happy people with good dental care admiring blue herons on a pond at sunset. You have arrived, the caption would read, had there been one.

I thanked her. She turned and ambled toward a back room as though hesitant to leave the runway, slightly stretching the high V-cut in the back of her knee-length black skirt.

Maybe buy her a lightly smoked glass desk. Don’t want the place to seem like a brothel.

Purchase the book to continue reading…