by Ed Teja
“Then Ramón…” I started.
Wilfredo stared at me with sympathy. “I doubt it very much. I wish I could believe it, but even then, we don’t have him or know why he might have done it.”
We all sat there feeling pretty glum. Then Bill piped up. “So, we have two things here. First, the fisherman is killed, which may have had something to do with a drug-related bit of business that he saw and thought involved Tim. Second, we know that some drugs have, in fact disappeared, but we don’t have any idea who has them, but are pretty sure that nobody we know of does have them. Is that right?”
Wilfredo scowled. “If I understood your Spanish correctly, then that is an accurate if rather convoluted description of the facts. Although Highball’s crimes are interwoven with the missing drugs and perhaps this Antonio’s death as well, we know that he is not directly responsible for them.
We lapsed into silence again until a sullen Maggie said, “Well, I think I’d better start looking for my boat.”
“Your boat is fine,” Wilfredo told her. “It is anchored in front of Puerto La Cruz right where you left it. I took the liberty of asking the Guardia there to look after it. It is still locked up and hasn’t been bothered.”
“Thank you,” she said. “At least I have a place to go cry.”
Wilfredo finished his beer and stood up. “You have done a good thing by bringing this man to justice. Don’t let the other bad news contaminate that feeling. I wish I could do more for your brother, but unless we get some idea of who has the drugs, or get our hands on Ramón, then I have no idea of how to proceed.”
We thanked him. He was sincere and trying to help. After he left, Bill stared at his beer bottle. “We all need a drink, and not some fucking weak-ass beer.”
I looked at him and saw him uglier than I have ever seen him, as if sadness plus ugly were a potent and fatal combination. He got up, moving slow, and went to the bar. Victoria and Maggie were huddled together, whispering. I worked hard at not listening. I hate hearing parts of other people’s conversations. The mind has a way of translating whatever you hear into something about you.
Bill returned with a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of water and four glasses. He sat down and opened the bottle and poured four stiff drinks. He handed them around.
“We tried, mates. We tried damn hard. But the joke was on us. Highball was a bad asshole sure enough but turns out to be the wrong one. And the hell with us if we can’t get our backs stiffened and get ready for act two of our little drama.”
“Hear, hear,” Maggie and Victoria chimed in. I felt like I wasn’t holding up my end of things.
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” I said.
We drank, and then silence closed in again. “Where do we start act two?” I asked. “I seem to have lost the thread of things. We seem to have wrapped up the loose ends from the wrong ball of string.”
“Nice metaphor,” Bill said. “Apt. Better than your average fare.”
Maggie stood. “I am going to start by going to Puerto La Cruz. My boat is calling me.”
“Don’t be in a rush,” I said. “She survived the last few days alone. She’ll make it one more.”
Maggie tugged at the tee shirt. “But I won’t. I prefer to wear my own clothes whenever possible. I’ll rest up and come around in her tomorrow.”
“I’ll drive you,” Victoria said. “My contribution to the opening scene of this act is to make some inquiries with some people in Puerto La Cruz, so I can drop you right at Fuente Mar.”
Maggie was pleased.
“Need help bringing Scape back?” Bill asked. “Either this rude sea dog here or my charming self could go along and pull on strings and do such like nautical stuff that makes saily boats go.”
Maggie bent over and kissed his cheek. “I’ll just motor, but thanks. I’ll meet you both here in the morning. Well, before noon anyway, if that’s okay.”
“Just call if you are going to be delayed,” I said. “I couldn’t stand you disappearing even for a few hours again.”
She kissed my cheek. “We got that bad guy. But okay.”
“That’s about when I’ll get back myself,” Victoria said. Then the two women left, walking arm in arm like a couple of girlfriends from high school.
Bill looked at me and refilled my glass. “If you can stand it,” he said, “I want to go through it all one more time, top to bottom.”
“We already have. Wilfredo just did.”
“And in the process, we managed to eliminate everybody. That just doesn’t figure. Unless Antonio’s family killed him or he pissed off somebody else who has nothing to do with the drugs, we are not talking about everyone possible.”
“All that is left is you, me Maggie, Victoria, and Chris. Oh, and Wilfredo.”
“Okay. Being prejudiced, I’m going to eliminate you and me for the spurious reason that we know it isn’t us, and we weren’t even here.”
“So far, so good.”
“Now suppose, just for the sake of supposing, that it was Maggie. She is in the area, sees Ramón stash his drugs, or stumbles across them during a family picnic, whatever, and moves them. Then she kills Antonio because she thinks that sooner or later, he will realize that it was her and not Tim that was there.”
“This is blasphemy, you know.” I swallowed my drink straight down.
“Naw, this is suppos’n. It’s a game, like. And you have to do for everybody to be fair. Now, if we suppose all that, how does it fit with the facts we know?”
“If she had the drugs, I can’t imagine why she wouldn’t have given them to Highball to save her skin.”
“That’s not good suppos’n.” Bill topped up our empty whiskey glasses. “Pretty good drinking, but too linear for decent suppos’n. You need more lubricant for that brain, Junior. Drink up and think up. She knew damn well that Highball would do to her every terrible thing he said he was going to whether or not she gave him the drugs. Her only chance would be that we would save her ass—that exactly what happened would happen.”
I whistled. “A dangerous long shot for her to play.”
“But the only hand she was dealt. Once he grabbed her, the daring midnight rescue was the only way she was getting out alive.”
“Wait a minute! You don’t think…”
He held up a hand. “It ain’t thinking, remember. Just supposing. But if I were to think, I’d think that the best reason to believe she isn’t the rotten apple is that she is the one who wanted you to come here. She was the one who put a fire under your butt to free Tim. She was totally in the clear until you started poking around. All she had to do was load up the evil stuff and get outta Dodge while everybody was still measuring Ramón for a body bag. No, I can’t see her being the one.”
He took a big drink. “I’m just being as thorough as I can. And playing no favorites, either.”
I took another drink and let the whiskey numb my throat. “You are good at this game.”
“Yeah. Well the next name you mentioned was…”
“Victoria!”
“Good memory. What about her? Same supposes, no more, no less.”
I thought for a long time. “Unlike Maggie, she did try to convince me to turn around and go home,” I said at last.
“That’s one against her,” Bill agreed.
“And she had damn easy access to guns and other interesting and useful gadgets and information about the various nasties. And she won’t tell us who she works for.”
“That’s two and three.”
I thought some more. “It didn’t hurt her any to help rescue Maggie.”
“Even helped. Now she is in the clear. Highball is declawed. No one would be watching her if she departed with the drugs. She might’ve worried about that. I know I wouldn’t want to be looking over my shoulder thinking he might be closing in.”
That didn’t sound good. “Where does that leave us?”
Bill smiled. “Only with
one person that we can’t eliminate out of hand. Doesn’t mean she is the one, though. Remember, this is just a little game of fitting theories to facts.”
“Then there is Chris.”
“Bit of a coward,” Bill said.
“Unless he was just hoping that he’d be leaving us all to kill each other off.”
“Okay. Fair possibility. Could be a coward as well, though.”
“He is the same size as Tim. Antonio could have mistaken him for Tim.”
“Could have. So, let’s make our famous supposes, he stole the drugs and Antonio saw him, but thought it was Tim. Then he kills Antonio. Does it fit?”
We both thought. We thought through another glass. “He hasn’t been around much.”
Bill chuckled. “If I’d taken the drugs and knew that people were killing each other to find them, I’d keep a low profile, too. It makes sense to stay low when Tim is handy as a punching bag.”
“He doesn’t seem the type.”
“What type would he be? He found the drugs then did what he thought he had to, to keep from getting caught. What type is Victoria? A weasel kills as surely as a lion, just uses a different strategy. And remember when you called him, he said that Maggie was out on charter?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you told me they were pretty good friends.”
“They are.”
Bill hesitated then flexed his big hands, clenching and unclenching them. “Seems like Wilfredo told us that old Scape has been sitting right in the anchorage in Puerto La Cruz all this time.”
“And?”
“Well, I haven’t been to Puerto La Cruz in some time, but as I recall, all the launches that go in and out of the city leave from the marina there.”
“He’d have seen the boat long ago!”
“Boy, when that light bulb goes off, you really do glow, Junior. Of course, young Chris had a lot on his mind. It is possible, we have to say, that he just didn’t notice the boat sitting there, what with doing Tim’s work and trying to keep a girlfriend and a wife both happy. But there aren’t too many boats in that anchorage this time of year, so I don’t believe that at all.”
I didn’t either. “So, having played this game, we now figure that Chris is the most likely candidate.”
“We might as well figure that. The ladies already do.”
“What do you mean?”
Bill chuckled. “I heard Maggie tell Victoria that she couldn’t believe that Chris hadn’t called you about the fact that she was missing. She never met her charter guests, and Chris was the one who set up the charter.”
“And?”
“What would you do, Junior, if you paid a deposit for a charter and then the boat didn’t show up?”
“Complain like hell.”
“To whom? The person who set it up, that’s who. Chris. He had to know something was wrong. If no one complained, it was because there was no charter. But I’d guess there was one.”
“But Highball grabbed her. Why would he try to avoid helping Maggie? Why wouldn’t he have said that she was missing? They are, or were, friends.”
“Hard to say. Maybe he didn’t know who knew what. Without some idea of what was going on, he couldn’t risk getting involved. And when you roped him into helping, I think he left as soon as he did because he wasn’t sure that someone wouldn’t say something that would let everyone know that he had the stuff. However, you figure it, the girls don’t see it as normal behavior for a friend.”
“Am I a day late and a dollar short, or are women just smarter than me?”
Bill nodded grimly. “They are, but they don’t have to be. It’s something that boys should be taught in sex education classes.”
The next morning Bill and I went to see Tim. He was conscious enough to enjoy our visit, but weak enough that we didn’t tell him the saga of Maggie’s kidnapping.
“Chicken soup is better for the kid than stress,” is the way Bill put it. But he remembered Bill’s job offer well enough. When he asked about the investigation, we were appropriately evasive, letting him know that some bad guys had bit the dust and progress being made, and pretty much letting it go at that.
Maggie was waiting for us in the lobby when we returned. “What time did you start out this morning?” I asked. “It takes a good four hours to get here in your boat.”
“Don’t know,” she said. “But it was dark. I woke up, restless, so I ate a quick breakfast and pulled up the anchor and here I am.”
There was a man with her. He was in late twenties, wore jeans and a ragged shirt and tennis shoes. He had a deep tan and his skin showed the deep lines that marked him as an outdoorsman. She introduced him as Pepe.
“He is Antonio’s brother,” she said. We shook hands and sat down. “I had breakfast with Pepe and his family. Then I talked Pepe into coming here to tell you what he told me.” She turned to him now. He looked nervous. “Tell them. Why did Antonio think Tim was involved in drugs?” she said.
“He knew he was, because he saw him with his own eyes.”
She put a hand gently on his arm. “Did he say what he saw Tim doing?”
Pepe rolled his eyes back. “From his spot, where he watched for fish, Antonio could see the entire Paso Campañero. One day, he told me, he saw Tim land his launch on Isla Caracas del Este, at Las Negadas.” We nodded. “There is a beach there that some fishermen use, and Antonio watched him dig up packages and put them in his boat. What could it be but drugs? That night he confronted Tim.”
“Did Tim admit it?”
“No, he said he hadn’t been there at all that day. But Antonio saw him.”
“Why do you say it was drugs?”
He smiled. It was an unpleasant smile. “In plain sight he dug up the bags of powder. We fishermen are invisible. Like the rocks, the pelicans and very clouds, we are seen but not noticed. For many years, only one thing has been buried on the beach. The drug people do not see us, and we do not see them. But Tim was seeing our sister, María. Antonio could not let María be mixed up with drugs.” He looked sad, then he crossed himself. “Now she is gone.”
“And Antonio had a clear vision of Tim?” Maggie asked, her voice kind. “He couldn’t have made a mistake?”
Pepe scowled. “It is a long distance, but Antonio had the good eyes. Besides, he could tell it was gringo, and there can be no mistake about the boat he drives.”
Maggie looked at me. “It has to be Chris,” she said in English. Then, in Spanish to Pepe, “Do you know the other gringo, the one Tim works with?”
He nodded. “I have met him.”
“Could it have been him and not Tim?”
He sighed. “Only Antonio would know that. But it was a day that Tim is always around the area. He often takes some man from Caracas to look at the beaches, and sometimes goes by himself.” He spoke with disdain, as if he couldn’t imagine a grown man making the trip from Caracas to look at beaches. “They are foolish,” he said. “The beaches are always the same. I would tell them that for free.”
We bought Pepe a coffee from a vendor in the lobby and chatted a bit about the weather and the fishing, and then Maggie gave him cab fare back to the fishing pier. “You know the peñero Delgado?”
He nodded.
“He will take you back to Tigrillo whenever you are ready. I’ve already paid him.”
“Gracias,” he said and went his way.
“Chris,” she said with a sigh. “I was pretty sure. It had to be. But why?” We told her about our conversation of the day before and how we had narrowed the field to the same person.
Then Bill said, “If you are asking why drugs? The answer is for money. Why kill Antonio? Because he was the only possible link between him and the drugs. Antonio might realize that he had seen Chris and not Tim. With Tim already identified, ready to take the fall for the murder, it was factory-made.”
“But I still can’t understand what he gained by not telling you when Highball
grabbed me.”
“I can explain that one,” a voice said. We turned to see Victoria dressed in her lawyer clothes and looking very severe. She carried a thick sheaf of papers. We said hello, and she sat down, put her papers on the table and ordered a coffee. “The truth is, young Chris was hoping Highball would stay on the loose and didn’t care who had to suffer for it. He wanted Ramón free, too. He wanted a lot of confusion, all of which would make everyone ignore him. In fact, you being kidnapped was a blessing for him.”
“I don’t get it.”
“When he realized what happened he decided he could use your boat to get the drugs out of the country the same way Ramón wanted you to get him out of the country. It was his only way out with the merchandise that didn’t involve sharing the proceeds and trusting other people.”
“He was going to steal Scape?”
Victoria nodded. “It would be reasonable to assume so.”
Maggie looked around the room. “Let’s call Wilfredo,” she said. “I want that bastard raked over the coals.”
Victoria shook her head. “It’s no good that way. There are too many information leaks in the police. With so much money involved, there’s a good chance that Pancho would get to him before the police. That wouldn’t help Tim, them finding Chris flayed alive. No, we have to catch him with the drugs and get them both to the cops.”
We all knew she was right.
Bill leaned over and took Victoria’s arm. “And I want to know, for real this time, why you care so much. Why are you so damn helpful?”
She looked into his impassive face, hesitated, then reached into her bag and pulled out a leather wallet. She opened it to show a shiny metal badge and a very fancy ID card. “Interpol. I work for a special drug enforcement unit.”
Bill nodded. “Now that makes some fucking sense.”
“Now tell us your story,” I said.
She leaned back in her chair. “I have been tracking this operation for about a year. When the drugs disappeared, I mean when Ramón took them, I thought that it was Tim who was his partner. When it seemed that Ramón didn’t have them anymore, I thought Tim had double-crossed him. I had the same idea as everyone in his path about how to find them—follow Martin. When Martin and I were involved with the shootout with Pancho’s people, I thought it would be easier to chase the drugs by helping him. That way, if I found that Tim was innocent, I’d do him some good. But if Tim or Martin were bad guys, well I’d have a front row seat.” She looked at me. “But you are all good guys, and we’ve all figured out who the bad guy is.”
