Don Bruns: Too Much Stuff

“Remember D. B. Cooper?” James was smoking a cigarette, blowing most of his product out the window at some cheap shell shops and a roadside cigar store.

“The guy hijacked a plane, right?”

He nodded. “Nineteen seventy-one, Portland to Seattle, this mysterious stranger grabs a flight attendant and tells her he has a bomb in his briefcase. When they land in Seattle, he asks for two hundred thousand dollars and a couple of parachutes.”

The story was that D.B. jumped somewhere over Washington State and was never found. Five or six thousand dollars were recovered years later by some hikers, and the FBI figure to this day that he died in the jump, but it’s the only unsolved airline hijacking case in history.

“I know the story, James.”

“Never found the money, Tonto. Never found the body.”

“And your point is?”

“Well, we need to do some research on the Kriegel guy. He had the gold, and when the hurricane hit, he could have used that as an excuse to split and take the bullion with him.”

I shook my head. “Do you know how much that stuff would have weighed? You don’t just split with ten cases of gold. That would be-”

“Over two thousand pounds of the yellow stuff. I figured it out.”

James kept his eyes on the road, and we passed a place called the Caribbean Club. A big billboard there announced that this was where the movie Key Largo was filmed. So there were some bars where Bogey and Edward G. Robinson had hung out.

The faded letters also announced that the Caribbean Club featured karaoke every Wednesday. Too bad it was Thursday.

“Are you thieves or what?” James glanced at me with a sly grin on his face. “You want money, is this a robbery?”

We’d spent too many hours watching the old movies during college, when we should have been studying, and this one with Bogart and Edward G. was a classic. I knew the answer.

“Yeah, Pop, we’re gonna steal all your towels.”

And then we passed Craig’s, with an even bigger sign that touted: HOME OF THE WORLD-FAMOUS FISH SANDWICH. We were “crackers.” Florida natives. You’d think we would have heard of this. It being world famous and all.

Suddenly all the brake lights in front of us lit up at once. Red as far as the eye could see.

“Shit. Probably some accident up ahead.”

The Keys were legendary for traffic jams that could last all day. Or, in some cases, days.

“We’ve got four cases of beer.”

My roommate nodded. “Two big jars of peanut butter, a couple of jars of strawberry jam, and four loaves of bread.” We did. In the back of the truck. Just in case the money ran out.

“So, if there’s a traffic stop, we’re good for-”

“Oh, hell, at least two days.”

We met Mary Trueblood at Pelican Cove. The place is a neat little waterside resort very close to where the train went off the track. You can rent a motel-type room that can be expanded to have a kitchenette, or expanded further to a two- or three-bedroom suite with living room, Jacuzzi, and kitchen if you had the keys to open the proper connecting doors. Heck, you could own the entire place. If you had enough money. We had all kinds of money. Expense money. If we could prove that we needed that money. To be honest, we’d already spent four hundred dollars on a laptop computer. That and the fill-up and a case of oil. And the beer and peanut butter. So we were already watching our pennies. We had to have a computer with us, didn’t we?

As we stared at the sparkling water from her balcony, Mrs. T. passed out margaritas. “Boys, there’s a fortune out there. Are you up to finding it?”

I had a coach in high school who pushed the cross-country team the same way. “Boys, are you ready for an adventure? Are you up to running hundreds of miles each and every week?”

I wasn’t and I quit the team four days into the season.

Glory and honor do not compare to thousands of dollars, so in this case I put up with Mrs. Trueblood’s little speech.

“Matthew Kriegel had ten containers of gold on that train.”

“Why?”

Who loads ten crates of gold onto a train?

“Fair question,” she responded. “The Flagler enterprise, by now called the Florida East Coast Railway, consisted of railroads, hotels, restaurants, whorehouses, gambling casinos-”

“Slow down.” She had James’s attention.

“Did I say something that you didn’t understand?”

“Whorehouses?” He gulped at his drink.

She gave him a stern, schoolmarm look.

“Whorehouses.” She pointed back to where the two-lane highway ran. “Brothels. There had been thousands of people out there working on the railroad. Thousands. Almost one hundred percent of those people were men.”

“And?”

“Do I have to spell it out for you? The men worked better-more productively-if they had some release. Mr. Flagler was against it. Very much opposed to the floating party boats, the gambling, the girls, and the booze, but his company quietly funded some of those more seamy ventures.”

“Ah.” James absorbed it.

“And even after Henry Flagler died, the enterprise kept producing. There were always camps of men working on maintaining the railroad. There was property that needed to be purchased. The federal highway construction crews were building a road to paradise and there were existing Flagler businesses that needed cash infusions.”

“Lots of places to spend money.” I got it. I assumed that James did too.

“There had to be places to go if the railroad was to get riders. There had to be destinations.”

The lady sipped her margarita and gazed outside at the azure-blue water where two lodgers kayaked in bright yellow skiffs. Inside, Mrs. T. had the bright kitchenette, the seductive Jacuzzi, and all the other amenities. We had one room and a bath.

I noticed James checking her out in her black one-piece. She’d been on the beach sunning herself and she’d come directly to her suite. This lady probably could have been James’s mother, but it didn’t stop him from looking. Dark hair, great figure, a smooth tan. I had to admit, for an older lady she was hot.

“So the assumption is that they needed the gold to support activities in the Keys. Gold was used a lot back then.”

“But this was a rescue train. They threw it together at the last minute, didn’t they? I thought its purpose was strictly to bring camps of highway workers back up to Miami. I mean, these guys were going to be in the middle of this hurricane and they were housed in tents.” I remembered the story well.

She smiled, standing up and stretching herself. James never took his eyes off of her body. “Boys, no one had a clue how strong that storm would be. My great-grandfather was going to leave for Islamorada the next day and his boss decided to send him down early. It’s as simple as that. The Flagler system wanted him to spend the gold on the various enterprises that the system owned and enterprises they wanted to own.

“He and a security guard were going to be dropped off, with the gold, and spend a week in Islamorada and points south. They had a car waiting for him, a driver, a room that was reserved at the Coral Belle Hotel, but there is no record of exactly what the expenditures would be used for. There was speculation that he was going to purchase another hotel, and possibly a fishing camp located nearby. He would purchase more places for tourists to travel when they took the train.”

I swallowed the sour drink and absorbed the information. That’s what good PIs do. They absorb information.

“The Florida East Coast Railway looked at this last train ride more as goodwill than as a means to divert a catastrophe. I believe the managers and the owners thought this hurricane was going to pass them by, but they would look like heroes coming down on a white horse and saving these six hundred fifty plus workers.”