“Why’s that upset you? I don’t care if you call me ‘studmuffin.’”
“I
“But if you want to, it’s okay. Now, what’s the solid you want to do me?”
The elevator door opened and they stepped into the lobby. A swarm of hungry office workers headed toward the cafeteria.
“Wellfleet Dynamics, Inc.,” she said.
“What?”
“The license plate you gave me. Those two guys who grabbed you.”
“Yeah?”
“The Lincoln is registered to a Florida corporation called Wellfleet Dynamics, Inc. I’m not sure how it helps you, but there it is.”
“Where are they located?”
“They’re not. Corporation’s inactive. It was formed by a lawyer in Tampa in 1989, the same day he formed Wellfleet Financing, Wellfleet Aerodynamics, Wellfleet Navigation, and a bunch of others. They’re all shell corporations.”
“Someone’s gotta own their stock.”
“Secretary of State’s records don’t show shareholders.”
“The lawyer who filed the papers. What’s his name?”
“Tully Meadows of St. Petersburg. Died in 1998.”
They paused at the door to the cafeteria. Two leather-booted motorcycle cops strutted by, in the middle of a joke about pulling over Janet Jackson.
“How does an inactive corporation renew the car’s registration every year?” Steve asked.
“I’d guess the parent company sends a check. But DMV-”
“Doesn’t keep records of who pays the fee, just whether it gets paid.”
“Right.” There was some satisfaction in their ability to finish each other’s sentences, she thought.
“I need to find the parent company,” he said.
“Even if you do, how will it help you defend Gerald Nash?”
“One step at a time, Vic. A leads to B, and B leads to C. Those guys who snatched me hired Sanders. Which means Wellfleet, or whoever owns Wellfleet, needed someone who knew about dolphins. When I find out who that is, I’ll know what they were gonna do with the dolphins. And maybe that will answer the question of why Grisby blasted the shit out of Sanders.”
“Seems like too many questions, too many steps,” she said.
“But if I get it right, Vic, the last step will prove that Gerald Nash is innocent.”
Twenty-seven
Victoria headed off for lunch with one of her witnesses, and Steve searched for his posse. He found Marvin (The Maven) Mendelsohn and Teresa Torano, those septuagenarian lovebirds, coming out of the cafeteria.
Steve quickly asked Teresa to use her prodigious Internet skills-she’d signed up for AOL the first day of its existence-to help him figure out who owned Wellfleet Dynamics, Inc.
“Only if I tell Victoria everything I tell you,” Teresa replied.
“Even-Stephen, Stephen,” Marvin added. “We gotta stay neutral.”
“Jeez, Marvin. I’m at war here, and you’re going Switzerland on me.”
“If we were gonna choose sides, Stephen, it’d be the
“Marvin, what are you saying? You and I go way back.”
“Nothing personal, boychik, but those animal rights guys are just thugs and terrorists.”
“Forget my client,” Steve implored him. “What about me?”
For years, Steve had bought corned beef sandwiches-
Marvin had some theories about purses, too, but Steve couldn’t tell a real Gucci from a knockoff, so that didn’t do him much good.
“I can’t believe you two are bailing on me,” Steve complained.
“You’re asking too much,” Teresa said.
“Teresa’s right,” Marvin agreed. “It’s not that we don’t love you. We just love Victoria, too.”
An hour later, having agreed to his posse’s Even-Stephen terms, Steve huddled at the defense table with his client. Ten feet away, Victoria flipped through her color-coded note cards. The judge and jury had not yet returned from the lunch recess. Marvin and Teresa sat in the front row of the gallery, equidistant from the state and the defense tables. Marvin thumbed through a copy of
Before she’d retired and turned over her businesses to her children, Teresa had owned a chain of funeral homes-Funeraria Torano-a jai alai fronton, and a Chevrolet dealership. She was an astute businesswoman and often helped Steve in cases that required some knowledge of accounting.
Teresa was a handsome woman with charcoal hair, thanks to regular salon visits. She wore a strand of pearls with a stylish black silk dress. Marvin, bald since he was a corporal in the Korean War, wore plaid pants, a turquoise Banlon shirt, and a madras sport coat that had been very briefly in style in the 1970’s. The two were madly in love.
Teresa glanced at Marvin, who waved to get their attention. “Stephen. Victoria. Come back here. Both of you.”
Steve hustled through the swinging gate, then belatedly held it open for Victoria.
Teresa smiled up at both of them. Her laptop computer rested just where it belonged, in her lap. “This is very fast, mind you, so I don’t have all the answers. But if you cross-reference Wellfleet Dynamics and all those other Wellfleets on file in Tallahassee with similar names incorporated in other states, you’ll find they’re all owned by a holding company called ‘Cheyenne Range, Inc.,’ a Delaware company.”
“What’s Cheyenne do?” Steve asked.
“Nothing. It’s just a holding company. But it’s owned by a Bermuda trust called ‘Island Group Investments.’ Whoever formed that company made it hard to trace back, but whoever owns Island owns Cheyenne and therefore owns all the Wellfleets.”
“And the owner of all the Wellfleets is…?”
Teresa waved a finger at him. “A publicly traded corporation. A big one. Four billion in sales. Hardcastle Energy Services.”
Teresa clicked a key on her laptop, and the Hardcastle website flicked onto the monitor. Rugged men in hard hats, oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, tankers at sea.
“The oil company?” Victoria said.
Steve was puzzled, too. Hardcastle owned chemical plants, refineries, and pipelines. The company was in the
