Items related to Murder in Exile: A Frank Cole Mystery
Frank Cole is laying low in the Panhandle of sunny Florida, working as a fact-checker for an insurance company while he awaits an appeal. The job doesn't offer much responsibility, which is exactly what he wants. Plus, it manages to keep his analytical mind busy so that he's not obsessing over his uncertain future. It seems like a nice setup for the time being, but things don't go as planned.
Eddie Gonzalez, a young man who only recently bought life insurance, is killed in a hit-and-run accident. The insurance company hires Frank to look into Eddie's life. Frank thinks the company is just trying to get out of paying the money and he sets out to prove the legitimacy of the claim. In doing so, he manages to ruffle the feathers of Dennis Dannon, the chief of police and a friend of the Gonzalez family, and to bring threats down upon his own head. As Frank looks further into the case, it becomes clear that Eddie's death was not an accident, and that the killers actually had another target in mind.
Vincent H. O'Neil makes a stunning debut with this first mystery, the winner of the Malice Domestic Contest. With a likable sleuth and top-notch plotting, Murder in Exile is a welcome and exciting addition to the genre.
Eddie Gonzalez, a young man who only recently bought life insurance, is killed in a hit-and-run accident. The insurance company hires Frank to look into Eddie's life. Frank thinks the company is just trying to get out of paying the money and he sets out to prove the legitimacy of the claim. In doing so, he manages to ruffle the feathers of Dennis Dannon, the chief of police and a friend of the Gonzalez family, and to bring threats down upon his own head. As Frank looks further into the case, it becomes clear that Eddie's death was not an accident, and that the killers actually had another target in mind.
Vincent H. O'Neil makes a stunning debut with this first mystery, the winner of the Malice Domestic Contest. With a likable sleuth and top-notch plotting, Murder in Exile is a welcome and exciting addition to the genre.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Vincent H. O'Neil holds a B.S. from West Point and an M.A. in International Diplomacy from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He lives in Cranston, Rhode Island.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter One
"So that's the whole idea. I come down here to sunny Florida, hang out for a while, do a little background checking for local lawyers, and make sure I keep my earnings below a certain level."
I reached across the concrete chessboard as I spoke. The board was inlaid into a small concrete table-and-chairs arrangement common to the seaside parks in my new home of Exile, Florida. Gray Toliver, a tanned and composed local retiree who played chess with me most Wednesday mornings, took in my words with obvious skepticism.
Gray was the closest friend I had made since blowing into town nine months earlier, and he was still the only one who had been told this story. I had been playing chess with him once or twice a week for six months, but until that day he had not asked very much about my background or why a thirty-year-old man was living the life of a beach bum.
"Okay, Frank." Gray took his eyes off me to move one of his pieces. He was a much better chess player than I was, but then again he'd been whipping the local talent for a decade before I got there. "Let me get this straight. You came down here to get away from your failed business up north--"
"'Failed' is a strong word." I hadn't meant to say that, but the sting from the memories was still sore. Luckily, the words had come out unheated. I liked Gray and wanted to keep him as a friend.
"Your business went belly-up. The Frank Cole Computer Company, or whatever you called it, went bankrupt. Right?" His voice was as even as mine, but this was one of the times that I didn't like him quite so much. He'd been a Chief Petty Officer in the navy in a job involving some whiz-bang analysis of airplane wings. I could easily hear a generation of former swabbies telling bored children and uninterested wives just what a pain old Chief Toliver had been.
"Yes, Gray."
"So, saying it failed is pretty accurate."
A gull screeched overhead before it flew between two of the park's trees. The surf, one hundred yards away, rumbled on in and then went back out as if it were inhaling and exhaling. I moved another chess piece without answering.
"And some psycho judge attached your future earnings as part of the bankruptcy. So out of spite you've resolved to live the life of a pauper."
"Hopefully not an entire life. The judge was way out of bounds with that ruling and it's certain to get overturned."
"Spoken like a true denizen of death row."
"Come again?" He'd moved while talking and seriously hurt my chances of winning this match. Well, truth is, I'd only managed to beat him twice in dozens of contests.
"I just wonder how many people go to the electric chair saying those same words. 'The judge was out of bounds. The appeal will come through.' I imagine some people spend a lifetime in prison saying those words."
"Let's hope it's not a lifetime." I pretended to stare at the board. In truth, there was a lot to recommend my spending the next fifty or so years in the Panhandle town of Exile. After three bruising years building up my company and three more losing it, I wasn't sure that I ever wanted any more responsibility than the simple fact-checking duties I had here in sunny Florida.
"One question. Bankruptcy is supposed to be a fresh start." Gray was amazingly well read and seemed to know a lot about everything. If he weren't so darned annoying when sharing his knowledge, he'd be on the cocktail party circuit instead of playing board games with guys like me. "So how do you end up with your future earnings attached, if it's supposed to be a clean slate?"
Gray had hit on one of the main flaws in the judge's ruling. Mark Ruben, formerly my college roommate and now a high-powered Manhattan attorney, maintained that an appeal held great promise because my case was the first one in which a judge had done something like this. When a business like mine is liquidated, almost all debt obligations are terminated one way or the other. The judge in my case had essentially written a new chapter into that law by attaching my future earnings as part of the settlement. Although Mark had been adamant that the law did not allow this kind of penalty, he had been equally sure that the judge was within his purview to set such a precedent.
Lawyers are like that. I had simply asked Mark if my wages above a certain level of income were in fact attached at that point regardless of a possible reversal. He'd nodded, and I had started getting used to the idea that I would be working off a titanic debt for the rest of my life.
"It was a combination of things. The judge in my case is dotty as all get-out. He should have been retired years ago, he was half asleep through the entire proceeding. Then there's a group in the legal community that wants this as a standard penalty in all corporate bankruptcies--"
"So they can get bigger awards."
"Yes. But you're right, this is supposed to be a fresh start."
"It's also supposed to get the debts off the books one way or another. Dragging these things out isn't going to be any good for the bookkeeping," Gray pointed out. As I said, Gray was a man of many parts.
"Anyway, one of the bigger corporate-fraud bankruptcies ended that very same week. A huge corporation. You might have heard about these guys: They cooked the books, bought girlfriends and condos using company money--"
"Bullitel. The telecommunications company?"
"You're an amazing guy, Gray. Yep, that's them." I watched Gray tear the game apart without seeming to look at the board. "The prosecution absolutely blew that case, and when it got tossed, there was a real uproar. Corporate fraud hit the front page again, and suddenly my judge thought he'd reverse the tide by nailing me to the floorboards."
Gray didn't announce the checkmate when he made the move. We both sat there for a moment, as if appreciating the climbing sun and the sounds of the beach. I finally stood up, actually having some place to go for once.
"Off to the private investigator work then?"
"I already told you, it takes a license and all sorts of other stuff to be a PI. I'm just a background checker, court documents, things like that." I brushed a hint of errant sand off my shorts and kicked some more off my running shoes, thinking honestly that there were worse places to serve out this banishment, and worse jobs as well. I could hear Mark's voice as I considered my observation.
"Go down where it's warm, keep the income below a level they can touch, get a tan, sleep late every day, play around with this background-checking gig, and before you know it we'll have this whole thing reversed." He hadn't represented me at any time during the bankruptcy, but when the money was all gone (as were the lawyers) he'd signed on pro bono and hatched our little scheme. "The guys breathing on you are gonna realize they'll never get a dime this way and pretty soon they'll offer something. Or the judge will have his long-overdue heart attack. Before you know it you'll be back in business."
The Sun Provident Assurance Company didn't seem like a big insurance corporation, but it was. It had offices all along the Gulf Coast, and a sister enterprise hidden under a different name that ran almost up to Charlotte in the east and Chattanooga in the west. It peddled home, life, and auto insurance out of branch offices that were sometimes nothing more than trailers, kept the overhead low, and reaped a fortune off the volume. I received sporadic jobs from their office in the next town over from Exile, and on a slow day had done one of my standard corporate background checks to see who these folks actually were. That's how I found out that Sun Provident and its sister organization were actually part of the same entity.
There's a reason I'm good at this. My failed business, as Gray had so tactfully put it, was a computer software corporation that had put other businesses on the Internet. It was far more than mere Web site design, as we built packages for the clients' supply chain management, billing and payments, and anything else that they might need. Before you get the wrong idea and wonder whether ours was just another dot-com bomb, we had real customers, a real product, and real profits--until the promised Internet revolution fizzled. Maybe it's a bit much to say that it fizzled, but it certainly didn't take off like a rocket, and those of us with payrolls to meet, suppliers to pay, and loans that had to be serviced had expected just a bit more business than eventually resulted.
And if that sounds like an excuse, sue me. Everybody else has.
Anyway, quite a bit of the background information that I seek out is available on the Web, and so I feel at home doing the work I do now. The sad truth is that most of this is held in some obvious places, and if people like Harvey Webster of the Sun Provident Assurance Company would just bother to give it a try, they'd soon be doing what I do themselves and stop paying me for it.
Harvey Webster was at least fifty pounds overweight, with a walrus mustache and a thin ring of hair around the region of his ears. He didn't seem to understand that a bald man can do a lot for himself by getting into shape, or that a guy with a full head of hair and a beer belly is still considered a fatty. More specific to my involvement, he was so lazy that I doubt he would have gotten out of a chair to walk around if he smelled smoke, even in his own house.
I got to Harvey's trailer at nine-fifteen even though we'd agreed to meet at eight-thirty. I was still fifteen minutes early. Having worked with Harvey before, I was not surprised and simply sat in my car watching the bad part of town wake up.
"Come on in, come on in," Harvey said as I joined him at the door. Although the day's true heat was still ...
"So that's the whole idea. I come down here to sunny Florida, hang out for a while, do a little background checking for local lawyers, and make sure I keep my earnings below a certain level."
I reached across the concrete chessboard as I spoke. The board was inlaid into a small concrete table-and-chairs arrangement common to the seaside parks in my new home of Exile, Florida. Gray Toliver, a tanned and composed local retiree who played chess with me most Wednesday mornings, took in my words with obvious skepticism.
Gray was the closest friend I had made since blowing into town nine months earlier, and he was still the only one who had been told this story. I had been playing chess with him once or twice a week for six months, but until that day he had not asked very much about my background or why a thirty-year-old man was living the life of a beach bum.
"Okay, Frank." Gray took his eyes off me to move one of his pieces. He was a much better chess player than I was, but then again he'd been whipping the local talent for a decade before I got there. "Let me get this straight. You came down here to get away from your failed business up north--"
"'Failed' is a strong word." I hadn't meant to say that, but the sting from the memories was still sore. Luckily, the words had come out unheated. I liked Gray and wanted to keep him as a friend.
"Your business went belly-up. The Frank Cole Computer Company, or whatever you called it, went bankrupt. Right?" His voice was as even as mine, but this was one of the times that I didn't like him quite so much. He'd been a Chief Petty Officer in the navy in a job involving some whiz-bang analysis of airplane wings. I could easily hear a generation of former swabbies telling bored children and uninterested wives just what a pain old Chief Toliver had been.
"Yes, Gray."
"So, saying it failed is pretty accurate."
A gull screeched overhead before it flew between two of the park's trees. The surf, one hundred yards away, rumbled on in and then went back out as if it were inhaling and exhaling. I moved another chess piece without answering.
"And some psycho judge attached your future earnings as part of the bankruptcy. So out of spite you've resolved to live the life of a pauper."
"Hopefully not an entire life. The judge was way out of bounds with that ruling and it's certain to get overturned."
"Spoken like a true denizen of death row."
"Come again?" He'd moved while talking and seriously hurt my chances of winning this match. Well, truth is, I'd only managed to beat him twice in dozens of contests.
"I just wonder how many people go to the electric chair saying those same words. 'The judge was out of bounds. The appeal will come through.' I imagine some people spend a lifetime in prison saying those words."
"Let's hope it's not a lifetime." I pretended to stare at the board. In truth, there was a lot to recommend my spending the next fifty or so years in the Panhandle town of Exile. After three bruising years building up my company and three more losing it, I wasn't sure that I ever wanted any more responsibility than the simple fact-checking duties I had here in sunny Florida.
"One question. Bankruptcy is supposed to be a fresh start." Gray was amazingly well read and seemed to know a lot about everything. If he weren't so darned annoying when sharing his knowledge, he'd be on the cocktail party circuit instead of playing board games with guys like me. "So how do you end up with your future earnings attached, if it's supposed to be a clean slate?"
Gray had hit on one of the main flaws in the judge's ruling. Mark Ruben, formerly my college roommate and now a high-powered Manhattan attorney, maintained that an appeal held great promise because my case was the first one in which a judge had done something like this. When a business like mine is liquidated, almost all debt obligations are terminated one way or the other. The judge in my case had essentially written a new chapter into that law by attaching my future earnings as part of the settlement. Although Mark had been adamant that the law did not allow this kind of penalty, he had been equally sure that the judge was within his purview to set such a precedent.
Lawyers are like that. I had simply asked Mark if my wages above a certain level of income were in fact attached at that point regardless of a possible reversal. He'd nodded, and I had started getting used to the idea that I would be working off a titanic debt for the rest of my life.
"It was a combination of things. The judge in my case is dotty as all get-out. He should have been retired years ago, he was half asleep through the entire proceeding. Then there's a group in the legal community that wants this as a standard penalty in all corporate bankruptcies--"
"So they can get bigger awards."
"Yes. But you're right, this is supposed to be a fresh start."
"It's also supposed to get the debts off the books one way or another. Dragging these things out isn't going to be any good for the bookkeeping," Gray pointed out. As I said, Gray was a man of many parts.
"Anyway, one of the bigger corporate-fraud bankruptcies ended that very same week. A huge corporation. You might have heard about these guys: They cooked the books, bought girlfriends and condos using company money--"
"Bullitel. The telecommunications company?"
"You're an amazing guy, Gray. Yep, that's them." I watched Gray tear the game apart without seeming to look at the board. "The prosecution absolutely blew that case, and when it got tossed, there was a real uproar. Corporate fraud hit the front page again, and suddenly my judge thought he'd reverse the tide by nailing me to the floorboards."
Gray didn't announce the checkmate when he made the move. We both sat there for a moment, as if appreciating the climbing sun and the sounds of the beach. I finally stood up, actually having some place to go for once.
"Off to the private investigator work then?"
"I already told you, it takes a license and all sorts of other stuff to be a PI. I'm just a background checker, court documents, things like that." I brushed a hint of errant sand off my shorts and kicked some more off my running shoes, thinking honestly that there were worse places to serve out this banishment, and worse jobs as well. I could hear Mark's voice as I considered my observation.
"Go down where it's warm, keep the income below a level they can touch, get a tan, sleep late every day, play around with this background-checking gig, and before you know it we'll have this whole thing reversed." He hadn't represented me at any time during the bankruptcy, but when the money was all gone (as were the lawyers) he'd signed on pro bono and hatched our little scheme. "The guys breathing on you are gonna realize they'll never get a dime this way and pretty soon they'll offer something. Or the judge will have his long-overdue heart attack. Before you know it you'll be back in business."
The Sun Provident Assurance Company didn't seem like a big insurance corporation, but it was. It had offices all along the Gulf Coast, and a sister enterprise hidden under a different name that ran almost up to Charlotte in the east and Chattanooga in the west. It peddled home, life, and auto insurance out of branch offices that were sometimes nothing more than trailers, kept the overhead low, and reaped a fortune off the volume. I received sporadic jobs from their office in the next town over from Exile, and on a slow day had done one of my standard corporate background checks to see who these folks actually were. That's how I found out that Sun Provident and its sister organization were actually part of the same entity.
There's a reason I'm good at this. My failed business, as Gray had so tactfully put it, was a computer software corporation that had put other businesses on the Internet. It was far more than mere Web site design, as we built packages for the clients' supply chain management, billing and payments, and anything else that they might need. Before you get the wrong idea and wonder whether ours was just another dot-com bomb, we had real customers, a real product, and real profits--until the promised Internet revolution fizzled. Maybe it's a bit much to say that it fizzled, but it certainly didn't take off like a rocket, and those of us with payrolls to meet, suppliers to pay, and loans that had to be serviced had expected just a bit more business than eventually resulted.
And if that sounds like an excuse, sue me. Everybody else has.
Anyway, quite a bit of the background information that I seek out is available on the Web, and so I feel at home doing the work I do now. The sad truth is that most of this is held in some obvious places, and if people like Harvey Webster of the Sun Provident Assurance Company would just bother to give it a try, they'd soon be doing what I do themselves and stop paying me for it.
Harvey Webster was at least fifty pounds overweight, with a walrus mustache and a thin ring of hair around the region of his ears. He didn't seem to understand that a bald man can do a lot for himself by getting into shape, or that a guy with a full head of hair and a beer belly is still considered a fatty. More specific to my involvement, he was so lazy that I doubt he would have gotten out of a chair to walk around if he smelled smoke, even in his own house.
I got to Harvey's trailer at nine-fifteen even though we'd agreed to meet at eight-thirty. I was still fifteen minutes early. Having worked with Harvey before, I was not surprised and simply sat in my car watching the bad part of town wake up.
"Come on in, come on in," Harvey said as I joined him at the door. Although the day's true heat was still ...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherMinotaur Books
- Publication date2006
- ISBN 10 0312352077
- ISBN 13 9780312352073
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages208
- Rating
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Murder in Exile
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Murder in Exile: A Frank Cole Mystery
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Minotaur Books
(2006)
ISBN 10: 0312352077
ISBN 13: 9780312352073
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