Read The Hound of the Sanibel Sunset Detective Online
Authors: Ron Base
Tags: #mystery, #Florida, #Sanibel Island, #suspense, #private detective, #thriller
The Hound of the Sanibel Sunset Detective
Table of Contents
Don’t Miss Previous Tree Callister Novels
THE HOUND OF
THE SANIBEL SUNSET
DETECTIVE
a novel
RON BASE
Also by Ron Base
Fiction
Matinee Idol
Foreign Object
Splendido
Magic Man
The Strange
The Sanibel Sunset Detective
The Sanibel Sunset Detective Returns
Another Sanibel Sunset Detective
The Two Sanibel Sunset Detectives
Non-fiction
The Movies of the Eighties
(with David Haslam)
If the Other Guy Isn’t Jack Nicholson, I’ve Got the Part
Marquee Guide to Movies on Video
Cuba Portrait of an Island
(with Donald Nausbuam)
www.ronbase.com
Read Ron’s blog at
www.ronbase.wordpress.com
Contact Ron at
Copyright © 2014 Ron Base
All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by
the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any
form by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, taping or information
storage and retrieval system—without the prior written
permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying
or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access
Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency,
One Yonge Street, Toronto, Ontario, M6B 3A9.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Base, Ron, 1948-, author The hound of the Sanibel sunset detective / Ron Base.
ISBN 978-0-9736955-8-8 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS8553.A784H68 2014 C813’.54 C2014-906530-2
West-End Books
133 Mill St.
Milton, Ontario
L9T 1S1
Cover design: Ann Kornuta
Text design: Ric Base
Electronic formatting: Ric Base
Sanibel-Captiva map: Ann Kornuta
FIRST EDITION
For Clinton and Marley
ART WORTH TWO MILLION
DOLLARS STOLEN FROM MUSEUM
MONTREAL (CP)—Thieves broke into the Montreal Museum of Fine Art over the Labor Day weekend and made off with jewelry and Rembrandt’s
Landscape with Cottages.
According to police, three men, armed with sawed-off shotguns, employing the same equipment used to scale telephone poles, climbed a tree adjacent to the museum shortly after midnight Saturday in order to gain access to the two-story 1912 Beaux-Arts building through a skylight that was under repair.
A plastic sheet placed over the skylight had neutralized the security alarm. The trio opened the skylight and slid down a 15-meter nylon cord to the second floor, police say.
At 1.30 a.m., one intruder twice fired a 12-pump shotgun into the ceiling when a guard completing his rounds hesitated before dropping to the floor.
Two other guards were overpowered, bound, and gagged. All three guards were then held at gunpoint by one of their assailants.
After spending 30 minutes selecting paintings and jewelry, the thieves used a guard’s key to open the door of the museum’s panel truck parked in the garage. In the process, a side door alarm was tripped and the trio escaped on foot, abandoning 15 paintings by artists such as El Greco, Picasso, and Tintoretto, but stealing 39 pieces of jewelry.
They also got away with
Landscape with Cottages
, painted by the Dutch master Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn in 1654 and valued at one million dollars.
—
Canadian Press
news story, September 5, 1972
1
S
o you really are leaving,” Rex Baxter said.
“I’m not leaving, I’m retiring,” Tree Callister said.
“It comes down to the same thing,” Rex said. He did not sound happy. He and Tree had been friends since Tree was a young reporter in Chicago, and Rex, a former B-movie actor in Hollywood, hosted an afternoon cable TV movie show. This was long before Rex became president of the Sanibel-Captiva Chamber of Commerce and Tree, retired from the newspaper business, appointed himself Sanibel Island’s only private detective.
Rex, ageless and forever dapper—an old lion in his comfortable, sun-drenched winter—had returned from a two-week visit to the Windy City in time to witness Tree packing up the office Rex had “rented” to him at the Chamber of Commerce Visitors Center located just over the causeway on Sanibel Island. Rent was a rather loosely applied term, since Rex never actually collected it.
“Don’t even think about taking that Scotch tape dispenser,” Rex said as he watched Tree lift it off the shelf behind the office desk.
“Is it yours?” Tree said.
“It’s not mine,” Rex corrected. “It is the property of the Sanibel-Captiva Chamber of Commerce.
“Then I had better not take it,” Tree said.
He placed the dispenser back on the shelf and looked dolefully at the nearly empty box open on the desk.
“Not much to show for your life as a private detective,” Rex observed.
“I carry a lot of memories out into the world,” Tree said.
“Fond memories of all those people who shot you,” Rex said.
“Only two people shot me,” Tree said.
“Let’s face it, Tree. Most people get through an entire lifetime without being shot at all.”
Irrefutable logic there.
Everyone on Sanibel Island had thought Tree crazy to become a private detective in the first place. Even his wife, Freddie, who had stuck by him after he was downsized from the
Chicago Sun-Times,
the newspaper where he had worked for most of his adult life, wondered at his sanity. Maybe it was getting shot that second time, maybe that was the straw that broke the camel’s back—or the shot that killed the camel. Or something. But now Tree figured enough was enough, and he had decided he was not cut out for the life of a private eye so it was time to give up The Sanibel Sunset Detective Agency. Not that there was much to give up.
“You can put that electric pencil sharpener back while you’re at it,” Rex said.
“I was sure that was my pencil sharpener.”
“Strictly on loan from the Chamber of Commerce.”
Tree returned the pencil sharpener to its spot beside the tape dispenser.
“I don’t know why I bothered to bring in this box,” Tree said.
“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” Rex said.
“You said it yourself. People keep shooting me.”
“I think it has a lot more to do with Freddie,” Rex said.
“There’s no doubt about it,” Tree said. “Freddie prefers a husband who is alive.”
“Come on outside,” Rex said.
“What? You’re going to beat me up because I tried to steal your pencil sharpener?”
“There’s something I want to show you,” Rex said.
A fire-engine red car, shimmering under the morning sun, was parked in the area reserved for Chamber employees. Rex led Tree over to it.
“How do you like it?” he asked Tree.
“You’re kidding. Is this yours?”
“The new Dodge Challenger Hellcat.”
“You’re driving a red car nicknamed the Hellcat?”
“Seeing as how I’m something of a hellcat myself,” Rex said.