Naples Nocturne

By J. Fontana

With a Master’s degree in Renaissance history and a law degree, (not a great combination) Florida Gulf Coast’s newest and off-the-wall private investigator, Joshua ‘Banger’ Maine, investigates cases his own way—outside the envelope but without the envelope. Having tried his hand at law and conventional policing he deduced that the more stimulating life of a P.I. was for him.

Set among the palms and wealth of ritzy Naples, Florida, Nocturne swings up and down Florida’s southern Gulf Coast, over to Key West, Miami’s Calle Ochos and the Tortugas as he strives to identity the killer after being hired by the philanthropic victim’s alluring niece-heiress, Monica Gladwin. His pain-in-the-neck, uninvited side-kick, news hen Jennie Jordan, is behind him all the way telling him why he is wrong about everything, until he counters with his off-the-wall theory, the Presumption Against Evidentiary Tautology.

And, as Banger says: I never wanted to be another Phillip Marlowe or Sam Spade.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tintern Books
• Release date: Oct 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781393556206

Book preview

1.

A good man is dead. A peaceful man, a generous man, a man done in by a quarter ounce of lead administered at high velocity into his left ear by an unknown killer. A rivulet of blood runs from his ear, tracing a meandering path across the navigational chart on which his head rests. Beside him, on the wall of the Black Jack’s galley, a small bronze plaque proclaims the man’s unintended epitaph. ‘Michael Gladwin − Citizen of the Year’.

Why?  A professional hit? A vengeful lover? Nothing points to either the killer or the motive, the News says. The whole thing really makes my guts churn.

I slam the newspaper down on my desk and gaze out the window, trying to suppress an unsettling premonition that soon it would have something to do with me. On a personal level.

Maybe you’ve read about me in the Naples Evening News. My name is Joshua Maine. I’m a private eye and it’s too bad if people have a problem with that. It’s their problem not mine. I prefer it if people like me though because I’m really quite an affable P.I., and that’s not necessarily a good thing for the dirty work I do. I snoop for a living, depending on how you define ‘living’. ‘Affable private-eye’ sounds like some kind of contradiction in terms, doesn’t it?

Nobody calls me Joshua or Josh except people close to me – my father and my sister, Martina. My mother used to call me Josh too, but she passed away two years ago.

A couple of months back an annoying neophyte reporter on the Evening News, writing under the by-line Jennie Jordan, must have thought she was being clever when she re-christened me ‘Bangor’ Maine. She pumped out a routine article about a routine divorce case of mine, another upper-crust couple taking a trip to Splitsville. Hardly worth mentioning. No doubt she was trying to make a name for herself. Can’t blame her for that.

My new name quickly morphed into ‘Bang’er’ Maine when a DUI arrestee complained that I had struck him unnecessarily. In fact, he had sucker- punched me. I’ll tell you more about that in a minute.

So there I was. I had a real name that was more than vaguely biblical, up against a name that was crudely offensive. Talk about the sacred and the profane. You can read whatever you want to into that if you’ve got a wayward mind, but I can tell you it’s not a name I feel I have to live up to. Anyway, since the name stuck, I decided it looked less crude if I eliminated the apostrophe.

Now before you think that I am just another ne’er-do-well who decided one day to rent space over a convenience store, hang out a sign saying ‘Private Investigator For Hire’ and start trolling for clients, you couldn’t be further from the truth. So don’t misjudge me.

Let me set your assessment of me straight by telling you that I have a Master’s degree in Renaissance History and Humanities from FSU, my minor thesis being on the humanist leanings of that fierce Renaissance warlord, Federico da Montefeltro, the Duke of Mantua. The thesis wouldn’t have been a bestseller even if it had been published. I ask you, in an age where a kid’s cultural genesis is nourished on a steady diet of the world according to Homer Simpson, do you really expect him to read about Renaissance warlords later in life? C’mon.

So I followed my Master’s degree with a law degree from the same university just to kill time and make my folks proud.

After graduation I tried practising law for a while with a moderately large law firm, Packard and Grizwald, just off 5th Avenue South, but I found the toil too dull and the clock hands moved at the pace of an arthritic slug.

Grizwald, the senior partner, assured me that in ten to fifteen years I should make junior partner status If you keep it up.

"Keep what up?" I quipped, thinking he’d get a chuckle from the double entendre.

Your work, he shot back. The humorless bastard never even cracked a smile. That was the end of that until one afternoon I was summoned to his mahogany-paneled office. In these plushy surroundings he commanded me to go down to the street and move a Mercedes so one of his blue-ribbon clients (who just happened to be sitting across the desk from him) wouldn’t get a ticket. My first epiphany occurred during the short elevator ride on the way down―somewhere between the fourth and ground floors―that a lifetime of this servitude wasn’t for me.

So I found the Mercedes, parked it in a Tow Away Zone a block away, dropped the keys off with our building doorman and kept right on walking down to the Fifth Avenue Bistro for a cold brewski. That was the last old Grizzy saw of me or me of him.

Then, talk about the worm turning into a butterfly, my great metamorphosis occurred when I became a patrol cop with the Collier Country Sheriff’s Department. That was an even shorter career ride.

A rookie cop’s job, sitting in a patrol car all day watching for petty miscreants, turned out to be a colossal bore most of the time. An airline pilot friend of mine, over a Miller High Life, once compared my job to his, describing both as being Hours and hours of sheer boredom interrupted by split seconds of sheer terror. I had heard the saying before, as I am sure you have. It’s an old saw.

As a cop, I never got to experience the sheer terror part except the day I acquired this slight anomaly you see on my nose. I had been in a couple of dust-ups before this one, trying to arrest drunk drivers and so on, but nothing like this.

This time my epiphany was delivered to me by a belligerent drunk, a bearded gentleman with a seven feet tall frame and a foot wide cranium whom, I was to learn, was a celebrity basketball player. He was at least a foot taller than me. When I tried to arrest him for DUI he initiated a painful convergence between his fist and my nose.

My broken proboscis took no consolation from the fact that the poor ingrate was just heading back to the rehab facility from his day’s community service and had stopped at a strip club for the obligatory Coupla beers. I called for backup and between about four of us blues we subdued his wild disputations and got him to the cells. The inevitable Ferrari was towed to the police compound up near Estero.

But, as they say, good can come from evil. A lawyer friend persuaded the hoopster to pony-up a fat settlement for my nose and my trouble. The girls now tell me that the slight bend in my beak is cute. Also, I consoled myself that whatever doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. My nose gives me character now, like a scar on your cheek, the kind you would get from a saber cut while duelling over a woman’s honor at Heidelberg U.

The news-hen I told you about, told me, very snarkily, that my face now reminded her of Tony Bennett. But she quickly neutralized the back-handed compliment, cautioning me to not even think of crooning I Left My Heart in San Francisco beneath her bedroom window. As if.

Anyway, when the Superintendent at the Sheriff’s office asked about my injury―and no doubt to forestall any prospect of me abandoning a promising policing career―he just said What the hell, Banger, you’re a tough cop. Stay the course and in four or five years you’ll make detective.

Four or five years? That’s a life sentence. But his comment gave me an idea.

That was to be the third epiphany of my young life so far.

I can be a detective right now. No waiting. And with my law degree, no exams to study for. Just do it. So I did and here I am.

All of which is just to bring you up to today and to tell you what happened this morning.

Here I am sitting in my office overlooking the Mercato, working on a decadently delicious Starbuck’s latte, after reading last night’s Evening News. I’m waiting for the phone to ring, which it does, much to my surprise. A big, new retainer from a fat-wallet client was incoming, no doubt.

Wrong.

It was my sister Martina crying into the phone for me to come home right away because dad needed me fast. He was holed up in his backyard workshop, she said, and refusing to come out, but she would try to get him into the house before I got there. He was in bad shape and crying. Crying? My dad? Something of catastrophic proportions had to be amiss.

Now I have to digress here for a second to give you a quick run-down on my dad. He came to the States back in the late fifties from the Abruzzo region in Italy and promptly got work in a boat yard over at Marco Island, which really isn’t much of an island. Dad had some welding experience in Italy so it stood him in good stead and he didn’t have to know much English to do it. The quality of his welding was what mattered, his boss told him, and dad was happy with that. No pay-offs to the higher-ups just to keep your job, no ‘commissions’ deducted from his weekly paycheck for protection. This was America after all.

Once each year you just pay Uncle Sam’s IRS what you owe for the good life you have. Dad loved his new country. 

His welding skills must have been great because that’s where he has worked for over thirty years, until he retired about a month ago.

Long story short, after arriving in Collier County, he met and courted my mother, an upper-middle class lady of considerable breeding and social standing, who was smitten by his Mediterranean good looks and Old World politeness. In deference to mom’s sensibilities, he decided that he should anglicize his name so that she would not be the subject of garden-party ridicule from the chattering matrons of her canasta club. That would be inevitable when they learned she was engaged to an immigrant.

You see, my dad’s family name was Domani. He was Antonio Domani, which translates into Tony Tomorrow and could easily be misconstrued as the nickname of a Mafioso hit-man or a character on the Sopranos. Either way, mom said she didn’t care for it, which really meant ‘I’d like you to change it now, Tony!’  When my mom explained that to him, he opted for ‘Maine’ because he had a cousin living in Bar Harbor and the name sounded a little bit Italian anyway.  At least so he claimed, but I could never see it.

So Tony Maine it was, and after they were married my sister and I came along. She was Martina Maine. And me? I was Joshua Maine.

End of story. Except that after thirty years welding boat hulls, dad finally decided to retire to pursue his pass-time: He collects old bicycles and bicycle parts, then designs and welds up huge sculptures of mythical people. A couple of his works are on permanent display in a park up in Fort Myers and the cognoscenti say there is a true artistic quality to them reflective of a primitive creative soul.

Well, you know how critics talk. They could have been describing dad’s homemade wine, his other hobby.

Dad’s workshop is off to the side of the house and is a clutter of acetylene welding tanks, arc welders, machine tools, and stuff more reminiscent of a medieval blacksmith shop than a modern day welder.

This morning before leaving, I headed over to the workshop.  Welding is hot work so he preferred working in the coolness of the morning. He was welding on a tall statue of Michelangelo’s David. He told me quite conspiratorially, that the finished work would be called David Schwinn in honor of the bicycle manufacturer. Dad had a serio-comic streak in him like that.

Dad had cleaned up the workshop pretty good though a few months ago when retirement was on the horizon; he had partitioned off a room in the back corner. It was sparsely furnished with a bed, night stand, a small table for sketching his plans and ideas, a goose-neck lamp and a small beer fridge.  That way, when one of the relatives or one of Martina’s friends came to visit, Martina could sleep with Mom. Dad could sleep in his workshop den and Martina’s room would be free for the visitor. I still had my add-on bedroom at the back of the house. So it all worked out.

2.

I apologize for taking the long way around―background-wise, that is―to tell you that within minutes of hanging up the phone, I was beating north up Highway 41, better known to the tourists as Tamiami Trail. Then I followed my customary route, east on Bonita Springs Beach Road until I got to the old family clapboard-in-the-trees where I grew up on the eastern inland fringes of Bonita Springs. We call our place Maine Mansion.

When I got there I parked the Alfa and rushed into the kitchen with my chest caving in. My dad was seated―slumped would be a better word―at the kitchen table. That well-muscled, swarthy, tough as a walnut silver-haired man was sitting at the kitchen table nursing a tumbler of his Moscato wine. Rivulets of tears were working their way down from his eyes, finding the path of least resistance down the wrinkles on his face to his stubbled chin. I almost began to cry myself when I saw him.

What’s up, Pa? I asked softly, placing my hand on his shoulder. What’s happened to make you like this, Pa? He just shook his head from side to side,  confused and disbelieving.

They killed him, Joshua. They killed my friend, Mike Gladwin.

I know, I said sympathetically. I just read about it in the News. He’s the fellow you welded up some yacht damage for?" Dad took another swallow of his Moscato while nodding ‘yes’.

Dad, there is no solace in booze, you know, I offered. You told me that when Ma died.

I know, Josh, but there is none in milk, either, is there? It was a pitiful, grief-induced wisecrack.  You’ve got to find out who did it, Josh. Mike was such a good friend to me. To everybody. Who could do such a thing? You’ve got to find the killer, Josh. That’s your line of work now, isn’t it?

Sure Pa. I’ll do what I can. And I’ll even have a glass with you, just to clinch the deal, Pa. Okay? I slapped him on the back for reassurance.

He lifted his head, looking up at me and forcing a thin grin before pushing his glass aside. I just finished that job the day before yesterday.  A fresh tear explored its way down his cheek. Jeez, I hate to see my dad cry.

Who do you think might have killed him, Pa? I knew it was a stupid question as soon as I asked it.

Who knows? I was talking to him three days ago when I went to see a few of the old gang at the boatyard and do that work for him, a small, one-day job. Mr. Gladwin said he would take me and you and all of us with our friends for a nice cruise down to the Keys as soon as his boat was seaworthy again. He said we’d have a grand time.

Dad had mentioned Gladwin before, always with admiration, proud to be of service to him. But I had always been perplexed about his friendship with the free-spending millionaire, a man who moved in circles that our family had long since abandoned any dream of.

It came as no surprise though that dad and Gladwin had struck up a friendship. Dad has a broad, intuitive knowledge that people find intriguing. That, coupled with his old-fashioned straight-talk honesty, makes him an engaging fellow. Over the years, working in a boatyard, he has regaled both his buddies in their over-alls and the wealthy yachtsmen in their blazers. He can discuss the beauty of a racing hull’s lines or give you a reasoned opinion on the best door-knob for the front door of your new house. It was a case of hands meeting across the socio-economic chasm.

And dad is self-taught. For that, he remains a wonder to me.

Pa, I have to say, I could never figure out how you . . . .

How Pa and Gladwin became such friends? Martina interrupted. She had slipped quietly into the room and overheard my curiosity. She was tearing up at seeing dad cry.

It’s a nice story, Josh, dad said. I’ll tell you one day. Now is not the time. Let me just say Mike Gladwin was a good man and leave it at that, okay?

Sure, Pa, I said and patted his shoulder.

I was standing behind him and could catch Martina’s attention without him seeing me. A flick of my head told her I wanted to talk privately with her, out of earshot of dad. Together we eased across the kitchen into the living room.

How did he find out about the murder? was my first question.

A call from the police not long after you left this morning, about an hour and a half ago.  They heard dad had been seen with Mr. Gladwin a couple of days ago. They want to talk to him. I took over the call when dad broke down.

Naturally, said I. Get a name?

Yeah, a detective. Funny name, Josh, it was Tibor something or other, I think his name was. He asked if dad would come down to the station to talk with the police about Mr. Gladwin and the murder. Sort of a gruff fellow.

Hmm. That sounds like it would be Tibor Gorski. I know him from a previous life. Good man. Low key. Loads of experience in homicide. Not big on the social graces though. His stock-in-trade demeanor is griping and grousing. Unless he likes you, and I think he likes me but most times I can’t be sure.

I went back into the kitchen and sat down beside dad. He had perked up a little but was still in a hang-dog, trance-like state. The police would like to talk to you, Pa. I think it’s Lieutenant Gorski, not a bad guy and a good cop. He’s also a friend of mine. Do you think you are up to it? I’ll take you downtown so you can talk with him. It might help you handle your friend’s death, Pa.

Dad wrung his big hands then swiped the backs across his eyes, drying first one, then the other. He looked up at me and forced another grin. It wouldn’t look good for the police to know I’ve been bawling, would it? Sure! Let’s go! I can handle it. He said it with an abrupt decisiveness I hadn’t seen since the time he spanked me once when I brought home a bad report card the nun’s at St. Rita’s School had given me.

But I was, as they say, confounded. Should I or shouldn’t I? This was really work for the police, wasn’t it? For Gorski and his gang.

But some bastard had made my Pa cry so I knew I’d have to give it a try. And no, I wasn’t starting to think in rhymed couplets.

Who do you think I am, Mohammed Ali for cripe’s sakes?

After he’d shaved and cleaned up we made a hasty retreat. It was a good thing I called out to Martina that we were leaving for the County Sheriff’s stationhouse downtown because she shouted back in a mild panic. No, no, I forgot to mention, that Mr. Gorski said he would be at the boat yard where dad worked.

Thanks for that bit of useful information, said I. And by the way, sis, Gorski is liable to put the cuffs on anybody who addresses him as Mister ever since he made Lieutenant. Says he worked too damned hard for the rank and won’t let anyone dilute it for him.

Dad caught the remark, understood it and accompanied me with a mixture of willingness and trepidation for his encounter with the great Tibor the Terrible.

Dad didn’t like open air cars of any kind and scowled the entire trip as my little Alfa Giulietta ticked over gleefully southbound on 41 and got us down to