Just Follow the Money

by Jinx Schwartz

  In loving memory of Robert “Mad Dog” Schwartz

  April 18, 1937—March 8, 2017

  If tears could build a stairway, and memories a lane, I would walk right up to Heaven

  and bring you back again. –Anonymous

  You were my heart, my rock, my best friend, and you made me a better person. We literally weathered storms, shared adventures, and made a wonderful life together. Without your patience, encouragement, and willingness to dive into this strange world of publishing, I would never have written a book; and but for your tackling the technical mysteries, none would be published.

  Our thirty years together were the best in my life.

  Thank you, Mad Dog, and give God a run for his money on that heavenly golf course of His.

  JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY

  Published by Jinx Schwartz

  Copyright 2017

  Book 9: Hetta Coffey series

  All rights reserved.

  The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to persons, whether living or dead, is strictly coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning to a computer disk, or by any informational storage and retrieval system, without express permission in writing from the publisher.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Epilogue

  JUST FOLLOW THE MONEY

  Cherchez la femme: look for the woman; the cause of the situation must be a woman

  Chapter One

  Jan slapped a newspaper in my hand. “Here! Read it and weep.”

  I gave the evening copy of Le Parisien a look and was dismayed to see a photo of Po Thang front and center, caught red-pawed in the act of pulling a white tablecloth laden with china, cutlery, crystal, wine, and obviously gourmet fare, from a dining table. The background made it clear the setting was in a first-class restaurant.

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, yes. I got the gist, but you translate it, okay?”

  I sighed and began to read aloud. “Faits divers. That means the news, but also means various things. Kinda like this and that. It’s a social page featuring local happenings.”

  Jan circled her hand. “Get on with it, Hetta.”

  “Alright, alright. Hold your horses.”

  “American dog faces deportation for theft!”

  I gave the perpetrator the evil eye and then read on, translating as I went.

  “Several incidents of vandalism and thievery at some of Paris’s beloved premier dining establishments have gone mostly unreported, and it is rumored that the crimes were hushed-up by persons in high authority. However, once a YouTube video taken by an assaulted diner was posted on the internet, reports by other eyewitnesses quickly emerged. As one victim, who asked not to be identified said, “Before I could shout au voleur! (Stop, thief!) my magret de canard (duck breast) had disappeared down the beast’s gullet.

  While the restaurateurs, chefs and staff remain discreetly silent on the issue, it has come to our attention that this is possibly the same dog that made headlines in the South of France last month while in the company of three American females boating on the Canal du Midi. These women are bruited to have ties to an alleged domestic terrorist taken into custody at the Port of Lauragais on the same night Charles de Gaulle airport was evacuated. The abandoned luggage that sparked the incident in the airport was traced back to this unidentified Frenchman (who was somehow associated with the three aforementioned American women) and we suspect a cover-up of epic proportions.

  We have also learned through unimpeachable sources that this diner-terrorizing dog, and his mysterious entourage of women, will leave France tomorrow on a privately chartered Air France flight.

  We may never know the extent of the havoc unleashed by these four, but at least Parisian diners will now be safe from this foreign canine with questionable table manners.”

  Chapter Two

  “Gawd, the French are such drama queens,” I griped as I handed the paper back to Jan.

  She chuffed a razz and flipped Le Parisien over her shoulder. The newspaper sailed through open French doors, where it landed with a plop and skidded across a gleaming checkerboard black-and-white marble floor.

  Po Thang—the badly-mannered foreign canine of mention—lifted his head and watched the paper’s flight as though considering giving it a chase, but changed his mind and snuggled back into his own blankie. This uncharacteristic laissez-faire attitude made me wonder if he’d slurped some of my champagne when I wasn’t looking.

  Jan, my dog, and I were sitting on our balcony, bundled up in feather duvets against December’s chill.

  “Judging by today’s gossip headlines,” Jan drawled, “we’ve not only been outed,” she frowned at Po Thang, “I think we’ve plumb worn out our welcome here. You lookin’ forward to headin’ home, Hetta?”

  I had to think about it. Was I?

  Just as she posed the question, the Eiffel Tower went into sparkle mode like it does every night for ten minutes every hour on the hour. Because Christmas loomed, the lights featured a lot of red and green. I raised my glass in a toast, “Vive la France.”

  Jan held up her own flute of champagne between us so the glittering tower and golden bubbles in her glass reflected through the sparkling wine, throwing a disco ball-like shower of light on us. “Jean Luc showed me how to do this.”

  “Jean Luc?” I croaked. “He was here?” What I didn't ask was, “At night? In your bed-sitting room? Drinking champagne?”

  “Well, duh. He, like, owns the place, ya know. You jealous?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I spluttered. “I just didn’t know that he...uh, I thought it was just you and Rhonda staying here.”

  “He doesn’t stay here. He has much finer digs nearby. This joint is just for visitors.”

  I swiveled my head and looked back into the “joint” we were occupying thanks to the generosity of Jean Luc. Our guest room, on the third floor—he owns the whole building—was a sumptuous one-bedroom plus sleeper couch affair with a small kitchen area and a spa-like marble palace of a bathroom, all of it a perfect blend of old-monied French aristocracy and modern convenience.

  Probably only France’s Minister of Finance knew its worth.

  Annoyed with myself and embarrassed by my inappropriate reaction to news of Jean Luc's nocturnal visit, I changed the subject. “So, where is Rhonda, by the way? I haven’t seen h
ide nor hair of her since I got here this morning.”

  “Today's a spa day.”

  “Rhonda has spa days?” I tried, and failed, to envision our frumpish friend at one of those Parisian glamour salons frequented by petite and oh-so-fashionable French women. It was Rhonda who was responsible for all of us being in Paris in the first place; there was a bit of truth in that newspaper article. Okay, maybe more than a bit.

  Hearing a tap on our apartment door, Po Thang growled, sprang to his feet, shook off his blankie, and loped toward the noise.

  Jan yelled, “Enter if you dare, but fair warning, Hetta’s here.”

  Po Thang’s growl changed to a friendly whine and I turned, half-expecting to see Jean Luc. Dreading it was him, if the truth be known.

  I was trying to think of something fitting to say to a man who had, quite literally, changed my life for the worse once upon a time, when my jaw dropped. “Rhonda? Holy Moly, what have they done to you?”

  She spun around, put one hand in a vamp stance upon the waist of a designer frock, and fluffed her newly jet-black French coif with the other. “Aimez-vous ça?”

  Stunned by her transformation, I was atypically short on words. Just weeks ago, when we first met, Rhonda was, to put it kindly, plain. Dowdy. A Hollywood stereotype of a frumpy schoolmarm who was about as street smart as a nun. She was, at the time, under the lovesick spell of a slick Machiavellian-like Frenchman whom Jan and I were convinced was scheming to steal her newly acquired inheritance. The femme fatale in front of me was akin to the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly.

  “Chat got your tongue, Hetta?” Jan teased.

  “Wow.” Sometimes my eloquence is downright astounding.

  Rhonda rushed over and gave me a hug, which I tolerated even though I usually save hugs for dogs and verrry good friends. “I can’t thank you enough for saving my life!” she gushed.

  “Yeah, if Hetta wasn’t such a nosy, meddling busybody, you’d be in tall doo-doo about now. Want a glass of champers?”

  “Can I have one?”

  “Of course you can, Rhonda,” I huffed indignantly. “Rousel le Roué is no longer around to tell you what to do. You can have anything you want.”

  “Oh, it’s not that, Hetta. Jan is keeping count for me. I’ve lost ten pounds in two weeks, thanks to her. Alcohol contains empty calories, you know.”

  Annoyed by that prissy-sounding insult to what I considered the nectar of the Gods, I downed a couple a hundred empty calories instead of verbally blasting her off her high horse.

  Jan, attuned to my piques, picked up on my irritation and smirked. “That’s so, Miz Rhonda, and congratulations for grasping a concept some,” she gave me a meaningful look, “never do. However, tonight is a special occasion, what with it being our last night in Paris and all.” She picked up her cellphone and tapped it. “Whoa, you deserve a reward. Your Fitbit says you walked ten miles today?”

  “Yep, before I went to Dior Institut,” Rhonda said, further vexing me by pronouncing the spa’s name perfectly as Deeor Ansteetoo; after all, I’m the one who speaks French here! I took another mouthful of liquid ambrosia as she continued. “I walked from the tower, across the river, looped the Louvre, then zig-zagged back and forth across the Seine bridges to the Plaza Athénée.”

  “Impressive,” I said, albeit a bit grudgingly, not only meaning the miles walked; the Institut Dior at Hotel Plaza Athénée is the number one—read expensive—spa in Paris, and a far cry from Aline’s Warsh ’n’ Set back in my Texas high school days. “I remember the first time I visited Paris and walked so much I had huge blisters on the bottoms of my feet.”

  Rhonda raised what I recognized from times gone way by as a silk-stockinged leg, and flaunted what might have been considered a rather clunky shoe had it not been patent leather with a faux zebra inset. “Arches,” she said, pronouncing the pricey brand of shoe perfectly as, “Arsh.”

  You’ve come a long way, Charlie Brown, I thought, but said, “Very chic. I see Jan has been busily spending your inheritance.”

  “Oh, yes. Bless her heart, we are having so much fun.”

  I almost laughed out loud. I knew Rhonda meant it as a compliment, but in Texas, when we say, “Bless her heart,” what we really mean is, “Bless her heart, the bitch.”

  “Well, God love her,” I drawled, adding my own back-handed Southern slur to Rhonda’s unintended insult. What the hell? A few weeks back Jan wanted to throttle Rhonda and now she’s her new best friend?

  Jan tilted her head at me and gave me a, F-you and the horse you rode in on smile, but none of these subtleties registered on Rhonda as she prattled on. “And now, thanks to Jan, men, even French men, are ogling me! Me! Well, as long as Jan’s not with me.”

  She was so enthralled with her new self that I didn’t have the heart to tell her that libidinous looks were the French male’s national pastime. We did, after all, have a common bond; I’ve spent the past twenty-some-odd years as the invisible woman when in the company of the tall, lanky, blue-eyed blonde, Jan.

  Rhonda did deign to share a glass of champagne with us. I couldn’t stop staring—okay, with no small amount of envy—at the new Rhonda. “You two have worked wonders. Well done, girls. Not only do you look spectacular, Miz R, you seem to have successfully washed that rat, Rousel, right out of your newly styled hair.”

  “Amazing, isn't it, that I was so naïve? I mean, ever since I graduated from college, I’ve done nothing but take care of Mom and teach school. No social life outside the occasional movie and pizza night with my limited friends. When my mother died and I found I had a considerable amount of money— ”

  I cut her off. “Which, if you hang out with Jan much longer, she’ll divest you of even faster than Rousel could have stolen it,” I teased.

  Jan stuck her tongue out at me and Rhonda giggled. “Thank goodness for you two.” She raised her glass. “To Jan, for helping me enjoy my wealth,” I rolled my eyes, “and to Hetta, for your...tenaciousness,”—Jan snorted in the background at the word, probably thinking bullheadedness more appropriate—“in protecting me from that despicable lout. Speaking of, have you heard anything about what the cops did with him? There has been absolutely nothing about Rousel, or his part in that terrorist scheme, in the news.”

  I returned her toast. “And hopefully there never will be, thank goodness. I sure as hell don’t want to be fingered as one of the people responsible for nailing his smarmy ass, although someone in this room seems to have put us on the media’s radar.”

  We all glared at Po Thang who moaned and buried his snoot in his blankie.

  “That dawg,” Jan declared, “will be the death of us someday. Anyhow, according to Jean Luc, who has contacts in the know, the only official report was the one issued by the French Minister of Defense in his press conference. Orly Airport was evacuated only as a safety measure when an unidentified female tourist,” she jerked her head toward Rhonda, “innocently left a pile of luggage unattended in the airport terminal while she walked outside to look for her boyfriend, who was late for their flight. That set off all kinds of built-in security measures.”

  I barked a laugh. “I liked that ‘innocently’ touch. When we watched the press conference, the minister’s facial expression made it clear he really wanted to say, ‘stupidly,’ but he refrained. At least he added the incident was thoroughly investigated and proved to be a false alarm. Period. End of story.”

  Rhonda, who had not witnessed the minister’s television dog-and-pony spin, shrugged. “Hey, as long as he didn’t use my name he could have gone ahead and called me stupid for all I care. Anyhow, Jean Luc said Rousel was told he was arrested because of something in the luggage that identified him, and now he's in the custody of some CIA-type group who will probably make him disappear for-ever. Fine with me.”

  Flouncing toward the door, one expensively clad foot in front of the other like a runway model, hair glistening and swaying, she stopped and threw us an over-the-shoulder smolder. “Let
me know what we're doing for dinner, okay?” Then she added, “Not that I’ll eat much,” before sashaying off to pack her bags—which she made a point of letting me know were Louis Vuitton—with several thousand Euro’s worth of designer duds and overpriced underwear.

  Compliments of Air France, we were all flying on a private charter to New York the next day. And not because our dog was on the deportee list; it was their way of thanking Jan, Rhonda, and me for being key players in foiling that terrorist plot against the airline at Orly.

  After the door closed behind our newly minted diva, I shook my head. “I think I liked her better when she was just plain pitiful instead of pitifully sanctimonious.”

  Jan nodded in agreement. “I am afraid I have created a monster.”

  At that moment the Eiffel Tower shimmered and caught my attention. “Right on the money. I could get used to watching this every night, all night.”

  “I kinda have,” Jan said. “I love leaving the drapes open and falling asleep with this view. What do ya figure it'd cost to actually live here in Paris, in an apartment like this one?”

  “More than we’ll ever be able to steal.”

  Jan grinned. “Not that we won’t try. You, at least have a shot at it.”

  “Yeah, right. Who do I gotta mug?”

  “Don’t play dumb with someone who knows you so well, Chica. You could marry, or at least live with, Jean Luc, and ya know it. He’s nuts for you.”

  “He's just nuts then. I’m in love with Jenks.” A deep sigh escaped me and Po Thang unearthed himself from his cocoon and rested his head on my knee.

  “What’s with the glum, Chum? Even your dog can tell you’ve got a touch of the blues.”

  “Well, for starters, Jenks left for Dubai this morning and I’m stuck in Paris, on my last night in France, with you and a dawg.”

  “Po Thang, I think yo mama just insulted us.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that we head back to Mexico tomorrow, then I’ll be in La Paz, alone, for Christmas and New Year’s Eve, no less. I was leading a pretty lonely existence there before I landed this job in France. Now that it’s wrapped up, I’ll be back to scrubbing decks and other boat work.”