BELOW THE BELT

  A MIAMI JONES FLORIDA MYSTERY

  BOOK 16

  A.J. STEWART

  To all of those fighting their demons. May you win more than you lose.

  And Heather. Who makes it all worthwhile.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The snowbirds know. When winter bites and mounds of black snow start piling up along the roadsides of Ann Arbor and Lowell and Quebec City, the snowbirds are gone. They’ve packed up their RVs and hopped their flights, and they’re bunkered down in trailer parks and golfing communities and apartment complexes across Florida, basking in the season.

  The sun shines, but it’s not so hot. The water beckons but only to those who don’t live here permanently. And the traffic snarls, so walking becomes a smart man’s best form of transport.

  The snowbirds flee south to escape their winter, bringing their troubles with them. Paradise is a breath of fresh air, but it isn’t the antidote to worry. Not if you carry it in your suitcase or in your mind. I know this because winter is the busiest time of year for a private investigator in South Florida.

  People bring their affairs and their deceit and their suspicions. If they were committing fraud in the summer in Cleveland, they are probably thinking about doing it in the winter in Boca Raton. If they were inclined to rhumba behind their spouse’s back at home in Ottawa, they’ve probably got a wandering eye in West Palm.

  Which made the fact that Ron and I were sitting in the office with nothing to do the exception rather than the rule. Ron was kicked back on the sofa in my office, reading a book about offshore nautical navigation, and I had my feet up on my desk with a computer in my lap, pretending to work but really poring over the stats that might unlock the secret to how the Patriots could turn their season around.

  The door to the outer office was closed because Lizzy was doing a winter clean, reordering her files, and contemplating a new paint scheme. I didn’t hear the front office door open or anyone come in, but my office door opened, and Lizzy poked her head around with a quizzical look on her face.

  “Um, Miami?”

  “What’s up?”

  “There’s someone here to see you.”

  “A client?”

  “Not sure.”

  “You wanna give me a hint?”

  Lizzy pushed the door wide open and stepped aside. The man who entered wore a tank top and shorts along with an expression that matched Lizzy’s.

  “Mick?” I said.

  Ron dropped his book to his chest and looked up. “Mick,” he said helpfully.

  Mick glanced at both of us. He didn’t look surprised that we were both so recumbent at work, but there was clearly something on his mind.

  “Is something wrong at Longboard’s?” asked Ron. He said it like he was concerned a close friend had gotten bad news from their doctor.

  “No,” said Mick.

  Ron let out an audible sigh. Longboard Kelly’s was more than Ron’s favorite bar. It was his spiritual center, his home away from home. My wife might have suggested it was the same to me.

  I dropped my feet and closed the laptop. “Take a seat, Mick.”

  Mick came in and Lizzy shrugged behind him then closed the door. As Mick sat down, Ron sat up.

  “What’s news?” I asked.

  “Not much.” Glib repartee was not really Mick’s thing.

  “But nothing’s wrong at Longboard’s?” Ron asked again.

  “Nup.”

  “So what can we do for you, Mick?” I asked.

  He looked like a little schoolboy sitting opposite the principal, except that he had a five o’clock shadow at 10 a.m. and was built like a fire hydrant. Spotting him outside his natural environment—behind the bar at Longboard Kelly’s—was rarer than a Sasquatch sighting, and the nervous vibe he was giving off was so unlike him it was giving me the heebie-jeebies.

  “Need help.”

  “You got it, pal. What do you need?”

  “Me, nothin’. But I got a friend.”

  I’d heard the I’m asking for a friend line more than most. “Okay. Your friend needs help.”

  “He’s sick.”

  “Has he gone to the doctor?”

  Mick frowned like that was a really dumb question. “That’s the problem.”

  “Okay. Let’s cut to the end. Why don’t you tell me how I can help your sick friend.”

  “He’s a boxer.”

  “Right.”

  “Least he was. Long time ago. Now he’s sick, you know, in the head.”

  “He has a mental health issue? Still not seeing how I fit in here.”

  “He’s in this fund. Insurance thing. Supposed to get money when he gets sick.”

  “And he can’t?”

  “Doc says he don’t qualify.”

  I looked at Ron. This was his raison d'être. He worked on all our insurance cases. It was pretty much the standard playbook of the less reputable firms to deny claims in the first instance, and often every other instance.

  “Does your friend pay premiums?” asked Ron.

  “Nup.”

  “So how does he pay for this insurance?”

  “Fighting.”

  “He pays in from the purse?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Okay,” said Ron. “Do you know the name of the insurer?”

  “Nup.”

  “And what about your friend?” I said. “What’s his name?”

  “Johnny Cabrini.”

  “Does Johnny know the details of the coverage?” asked Ron.

  “Doubt it.”

  “Does anyone?”

  “His wife.”

  “Johnny’s wife? She handles all the paperwork?”

  “I’d reckon.”

  “Do you want us to have a chat with her?” I asked. “Get the lowdown?”

  “Yep.”

  “All right, then. Let’s do that.” I stood. “Is Longboard’s open?”

  “Nup.”

  “Do you need to be there to open up?”

  “Nup. Muriel.”

  I nodded. Muriel was the bartender at Longboard’s, and it wasn’t an overstatement to say the place couldn’t run without her. It had never occurred to me before, but I now had the thought that she was to Mick what Lizzy was to me. Like Muriel, Lizzy had skills, many of which she hid away until required, but Muriel had one skill Lizzy didn’t have: she knew how to tap a keg.

  “Muriel can open,” I said. “Good. You wanna go see this Johnny Cabrini now?”

  “Nup.”

  “You’re busy?”

  “Nup.”

  “So why not?”

  “Dunno where he is.”

  I didn’t know where to take the conversation, so I looked at Ron.

  “What about his wife?” said Ron. “Do you know where she is?”

  “At home.”

  “Do you know where their home is?”

  “Yep.”

  “All right,” I said. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Let’s go see Mrs. Cabrini.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  We piled into my Jeep, Mick and I in the front and Ron in the back. Mick directed me down I-95 toward Lake Worth, which at some point had been renamed Lake Worth Beach, even though there was only about two hundred yards of beach in the whole city. There really wasn’t a lake either, given Lake Worth Lagoon was technically just part of the Intracoastal Waterway, but that was the way names rolled in Florida. Hyperbole stretched to the point of snapping.

  I got off the freeway at Forest Hill Boulevard. Mick pointed me west, then down South Military Trail and around the city of Palm Springs, until he directed me to the side streets just past 10th Avenue.

  The area was single-family residential, no sidewalks, parched streets, and front yards that were as much sand as grass. Most of the houses dated back to the middle of the previous century and were fiberboard over asbestos, except for the handful here and there that had been razed and rebuilt using hurricane-proof cinder block.

  The house we stopped in front of had not been painted in fifty years and hadn’t been washed in twenty. It might have been white once upon a time, but now its hue defied the color wheel. The lawn had a length and color that suggested it was recovering from a hangover.

  We walked up a cracked concrete driveway that led toward a one-car garage. Mick stepped across the grass to a front door with no porch and knocked. We waited in the pleasant breeze.

  A grim woman in jeans and a black T-shirt opened the door as if smiling was just too damn hard. She nodded at Mick.

  “Teens,” said Mick. “This is the guy.”

  The woman first looked at Ron and then at me, then she returned to Mick. I got that. It happened a lot. Ron wore a polo and trousers; his silver-gray mane gave him an air of dependability. I wore a palm tree-print shirt with board shorts, and my blond mop looked like I had just rolled out of bed.

  “Come in,” she said.

  I followed Mick and Ron inside. The living room was small but neat, family pictures on the wallpapered walls, an old sofa and two vinyl chairs. I spotted a kitchen off the living room and a short hallway leading to three doors: I figured two bedrooms and a bathroom. I got the impression that any disrepair was the fault of the landlord more than the tenants.

  I offered my hand to the woman as I stepped by her: “Miami Jones.”

  She glanced at Ron again, then
nodded. “Tina Cabrini.”

  I looked at the photos on the wall. “Your kids?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How many?”

  “Three. Sofia is twenty-four and she lives with her boyfriend up in Palm Beach Gardens. Our two youngest are Anna and Josephine. Fourteen and sixteen.”

  “High school? Tough years.”

  “They’re good girls.”

  “I’m sure they are.”

  Tina offered us seats, which we took, and water, which we did not.

  “So, Mrs. Cabrini, Mick says you’re having some issues with an insurance claim.”

  “It’s Tina, and yeah, it’s something like that.”

  “Is your husband home, Tina?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Well, we might need to talk with him too, since I understand the policy is with him.”

  “If you say so.”

  “This is my colleague, Ron. He’s our insurance expert. Perhaps if you tell him a little about what’s happening . . .”

  Tina blinked slowly, suggesting she had told the story one too many times. “It’s not insurance, not exactly.”

  “What is it?” asked Ron.

  “They call it a fund, an athlete’s fund. The way I understand it is, it’s supposed to take care of boxers after they call it quits. My husband was a boxer—you knew that, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Ron. “Mick mentioned it. What can you tell me about this fund? How did you pay into it?”

  “Part of the money he earned from each fight went into it.”

  “Do you know how much?”

  “Twenty percent.”

  “And has he ever made a claim from this fund before?”

  “No.”

  “Not when he was boxing?”

  “No, he couldn’t then. This was only for after the end of his career, if you want to call it that.”

  “Tina, do you have any paperwork from this fund? Contracts, letters, that sort of thing?”

  “Yeah.” Tina pushed herself up out of her chair with long, slim arms and wandered away down the hall.

  “How long did Johnny box for?” I asked Mick.

  “Pro, twenty years. Five or six amateur.”

  “When did he retire?”

  “When they stopped calling.”

  “Which was . . . ?”

  “Maybe ten years ago.”

  Tina returned with a shoebox in her hands, then sat and opened the box. She started pulling out papers and handing them to Ron.

  “This is one of the GBC fight contracts. The fund split is on the last page.”

  “GBC?” asked Ron.

  “Global Boxing Council.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “This is the letter we got from the fund denying payment.”

  Ron looked at the letter. “Post office box in Palm Beach. No street address.”

  “Is that a problem?” said Tina.

  “Not really. Do you have a notice of what the coverage is?”

  “We never got anything like that. The girl at the doctor’s said it was on the GBC website, but I don’t have a computer.”

  “No problem, I’ll check it out,” said Ron. “It says your husband was denied because he didn’t meet medical criteria. Do you know who made that determination?”

  “Their doctor.”

  “I see,” said Ron.

  “Their doctor?” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  “As opposed to your doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you had a second opinion?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Johnny saw two doctors.”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was their doctor?”

  “Dr. Wrexham.”

  “And he said Johnny didn’t qualify?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And your doctor? Who was he?”

  “Dr. Abe.” She pronounced it like Lincoln’s first name.

  “And did he agree?”

  “No, he said Johnny needed treatment.”

  “And you need the fund payout to cover the treatment?”

  “I need the fund payout to cover the rent.”

  “How did you find your doctor?”

  “He’s with the university. He’s doing some kind of study on old fighters. The doctor’s visits and some of the medications are free, so Johnny did it.”

  “Do you have contact details for those doctors?” I asked.

  Tina walked into the kitchen, and I heard the click of magnets on the fridge. She returned with two business cards.

  “I’ll need them back.”

  “That’s okay.” I took a photo of each card with my phone and then gave them back to her. “I should get your number too.”

  She put her hand out, so I gave her my phone. After punching in her details, she tapped out something else, and I heard a whoosh on my phone followed by a ping on hers.

  “Now I’ve got your number as well.”

  “Good.”

  Ron held up the shoebox. “Do you mind if I take these for a day? I’ll copy them and return them to you.”

  “That’s fine, I guess. So what do you think you can do?”

  “We’ll need to look into what the specific terms are for the fund and see if Johnny really does qualify. Sometimes a denial of payment is just a tactic. They hope you’ll take it on the chin and leave it alone. But often if we make a bit of noise with the right people, we can change their view on it.”

  “What people?”

  “I’ll find that out,” said Ron.

  I stood, and Ron and Mick followed my lead. “Tina, why did you see this other doctor, Wrexham, if you already had seen Dr. Abe?”

  “They said we had to.”

  “The fund?”

  “Uh-huh. One of those letters there. They said we have to go through their doctor.”

  I looked at Ron. He nodded.

  “All right. Thanks for your time.”

  We walked out to the car as Mick said goodbye to Tina. We scrambled into the Jeep, sitting as we did before, and I drove back toward the freeway.

  “Well?” asked Mick.

  “We’ll check it out,” I said. “What do you think, Ron?”

  “I’ll need to confirm the terms of the fund. Under workers’ compensation rules in Florida, your employer can designate which doctor you have to see, so that might not be so strange, but the variation in diagnosis is interesting.”

  “Tina mentioned having to make rent,” I said to Mick. “Are things that close to the bone?”

  “I guess.”

  “Does she work?”

  “Cashier at a drug store.”

  “And Johnny?”

  “This and that.” He looked at me. “Don’t worry, I’ll pay your bill.”

  “I don’t care about the bill. I just don’t want to see anyone out on the street. Listen, Mick, in your opinion, how bad is Johnny’s condition?”

  “Good days but a lotta bad days. Can’t keep a job.”

  I nodded and kept my eyes on the road. I figured Mick had given up all the information he was going to, and it was of limited value anyway.

  Time to start digging elsewhere.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I parked in the lot beside my office building on Banyan Boulevard, and Mick headed for his car. Ron and I took the stairs up. It wasn’t exactly running a marathon, but those little spurts of energy helped offset the beers at Longboard’s—a trade well worth making.

  Lizzy was standing in the outer office with her hand to her chin like an art critic, staring at color swatches on the wall. There were a lot of pastels.

  “Anything but coral,” I said.

  “Coral is very soothing.”

  “Not to me.”

  “I’m more concerned with your clients. They don’t usually come here unless they’re under some kind of stress.”

  “They’ll be under more stress if I have to look at coral.”

  “What’s wrong with coral?” asked Ron, not acting like a proper wingman. I planned to have a word with him about that.

  “Flashbacks to childhood. Enough said.”

  “How did you do?” asked Lizzy.

  I outlined the dearth of information from Mick and Tina, and Ron divided up the work. He would take the fund and insurance angle, and Lizzy would look into anything else that popped up, which didn’t leave a lot for me to do. Ron went into his office—he preferred to keep it more as a storage room—and Lizzy worked at her desk. I contemplated a nap on the sofa but felt guilty about not pulling my weight, so I wasted time on my laptop looking up Johnny Cabrini.