by Dave Daren
I sauntered through the dusty lot and looked for any signs of life anywhere. I finally found a squirrely looking young guy, with acne and a too big gray drab uniform.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for Tony Sanchez. Any idea where he might be?”
He gave me a vacant stare and didn’t say anything.
“Tony Sanchez?” I asked. “Do you know him? Does he work here?”
Again he just stared at me.
“Anyone else around here might know Tony?” I gestured around the property.
Nothing.
“Alright,” I said. “Thanks for all your help.”
“Uh-huh,” he finally mumbled and then wandered off.
That guy was weird.
I kept going, and then the crane came to life, and started moving metal containers around. Still no sign of life.
I found another man, a burly guy with a full beard and squinty eyes. He was loading boxes onto wooden pallets.
“Hi,” I approached him. “I’m looking for Tony Sanchez. Do you know where I might find him?”
The man smiled and nodded politely and then went back to loading the pallets.
“Tony Sanchez?” I repeated. “Do you know him?”
He shrugged and then fired off in Russian at me in an apologetic tone. Then he went back to loading his pallets.
I sighed and moved on. I looked around and saw no one else in this desolate place. Even the mute kid had disappeared. I approached the building, and then saw two workers sitting on the side of the curb, speaking to each other in animated Spanish.
“Hi,” I waved for their attention. They silenced and turned toward me. “I’m looking for Tony Sanchez. Do you know where I might find him?”
Then looked at each other and laughed.
“Tony?” one of them asked.
“Yeah,” I said, relieved that someone at least recognized the name.
“He’s not here,” the other one laughed.
“Okay,” I nodded. “Do you have any ideas of where to find him?”
“Yeah,” the first one chuckled. “Oh I know exactly where to find him.”
“Great,” I said as I pulled out my phone to jot down the address. “Any chance that he might be there now?”
“Yep,” the first one said. “I’d say, one hundred per cent chance. He’s not going nowhere.”
They both laughed and I didn’t get the joke.
“Has he...passed or something?” I asked.
“No, no,” the first one assured me. “He’s alive.”
“Let’s see,” the first guy said as they looked at each other. “You go down this road over here.”
He them stood and gestured toward the direction of the street.
“Uh-huh,” I said as I started making mental note of the directions.
“You go down all of this way, till you get to the Sedona Police Department,” he said. “Then you go inside, and you look inside the bars. You will find him. I guarantee it.”
The guys both dissolved into laughter, and I finally got the joke.
“Ah,” I nodded. “Tony’s in jail.”
“He’s in there for a long time,” the man shook his head.
“What did he do, might I ask?” I replied.
“Selling unlicensed herbal remedies,” the man said. “His family has a farm where they sell herbal teas and little leaves and stuff to heal your back.”
He rubbed his lower back as he explained.
“That shit works, too,” he said. “He sold me some, and I use it for my back pain every night before I go to sleep. It’s good stuff. But, none of it was licensed. At first it was okay, because he was just selling to his friends and stuff. Then, he started to get big, and started making money off it, and got busted.”
“Sucks man,” the other guy shook his head. “He was a good guy. Just trying to help people with their aches and stuff.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Is this herbal remedy also known as marijuana?”
They glanced at each other.
“Some of it,” one of them said. “But he really did sell herbal remedies.”
I smirked. “I’m sure he did. Thanks guys, you’ve been very helpful.”
I turned and walked back out to my car. Yeah, this Tony Sanchez guy was shady. He was a pot dealer, and my guess is he was using the shipping company in some way to move his product. He was also somehow consorting with Irwin Montague to get antiques and other valuables in and out of the country. If I was correct, some of those valuables including getting the elephant tusks from the Matthews backyard, out of the country. That was the link out. But the question I needed to answer was, how did they get in in the first place?
Of course, if I could answer that, I could free Kelsi.
I definitely needed to talk to Tony. But he wasn’t going to give up his sources that easily. I needed something to make him want to tell me who he was working with.
I drove back to the office with more questions than answers. This thing was getting to be a monster. I knew that it would be. Vicki and AJ were back now, and I finally got a chance to talk to AJ about the studio and the script.
“Yeah,” she said. “I wrote the script from the old blog posts about the case. I wasn’t sure if it was stupid or was going to go anywhere, so I wasn’t going to say anything until I was sure.”
“So Leila is selling me her company,” I said. “For twenty grand.”
“Wow,” she nodded. “Good for her.”
“She’s splitting it with you,” I said.
“I get ten thousand?” she looked incredulously. “Free money.”
“Pretty much,” I said. “The company includes the screenplay.”
“Well,” she said. “I mean, potentially you could make a lot of money on that, if you turn it into a movie. Would I have rights and all of that?”
I nodded. “It becomes property of the company. So if you join the company, it’s just considered work. And whatever involvement you want to have and at what royalty percentage, will be hashed out in contracts with Phoenix. Which, in reality, you’ll probably draft, because I’m his lawyer--”
“And I would do that for a client anyway,” she finished.
“Right,” I said.
“Cool,” she said. “So would I become a partner with your company, or what? How does that work?”
“That’s all Phoenix,” I said. “The three of you will have to hash out roles.”
“Did she sign anything?” AJ asked.
I shook my head. “She was waiting on you to confirm.”
“I want to talk to Phoenix first,” she said.
“I would definitely do that,” I said.
AJ turned to her laptop, clearly preoccupied with the turn of events. I turned to Vicki.
“How’d it go with the yoga instructor?” I asked.
“I clobbered the former employee and he dropped the suit,” she said.
“That’s good,” I said.
“Definitely,” she said.
“You got a sexual harrassment case dropped?” AJ asked incredulously. “That’s like against the rules of womanhood.”
Vicki laughed. “Normally I would agree with you. But, this was an entirely consensual case of a guy who wanted to screw his boss. Then, when she decided she was over it, he got mad and got vindictive.”
“In a way,” AJ said, “he’s harrassing her. If she wanted to stop, and then he created a hostile work environment.”
“It gets worse,” she said, “because he was really bad at his job. She only kept him on because they had a thing going on. And, then, when the fling played itself out, she fired him like she should have done in the first place. So, the break up and the firing happened all in the same week, and so he connected the two, and had enough of a case for like...five minutes. So, we all wasted a lot of time and money on what was basically a guy with a hurt ego because a woman told him no.”
“Well at least we get paid,” I sighed as I pulled up our invoicing software. “W
hat do we got in billable hours?”
“I’ll get you that,” she said. “I don’t know right off.”
I spent the rest of the day writing up invoices and calculating billable hours. I just bought a film studio. We needed to up our cash flow.
I also texted Phoenix about that budget proposal and business plan. I was already wheeling and dealing, buying out the competition for him, and I was doing this all on some old clips he posted from South America. He needed to start showing me he was more than talk.
The day ended none too soon, and I wanted nothing more than to curl up with Vicki and watch Netflix and eat sushi.
“I’m ordering Fifth Street delivery,” I told Vicki as I tapped around on my phone on my out to the car.
Fifth Street Bistro was our go to sushi place downtown. Although, come to think of it, I don’t think we’d ever been inside. We only ordered delivery and had Netflix binge night.
“Fifth Street delivery,” AJ laughed as she walked with us out to the parking lot. “You guys are such a boring married-ish couple.”
We laughed.
“We’re not boring,” Vicki said.
“You gotta go out,” she said. “Be seen, out and about.”
“Ugh,” I said. “I did all that when I was younger. It’s exhausting.”
“Yeah,” Vicki said. “You gotta like put on twelve pounds of make up at ten o’clock at night, and wear some dress you can barely breathe in and then you gotta strut your stuff all night.”
“That’s half the fun,” AJ unlocked her car.
“Alright,” I said. “Maybe we are old and boring. You going out and about?”
“Maybe,” she winked and shook her hips just a little bit. Vicki and I just laughed and AJ ducked into her car.
“Well,” I turned to Vicki. “I think we’re quite interesting people.”
“Yeah,” Vicki said. “Although she has a point. We do need to expand our social circle a bit.”
I made a face and unlocked the car door.
“What?” she said as we settled into the car.
I sighed. “Sedona’s growing on me. Don’t get me wrong. I love the place. But, it’s just, most of the people I went to high school with out here, aren’t really people I’d be close friends with.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “And that’s a fancy way of saying, ‘I’m a big fat snob.’”
“Alright, fine,” I said. “You start hanging out with some of my old high school friends, I mean like, really hanging out with them. And you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
“Is that right?” she said. “Because Julianna Spencer invited us to a game night at her house tomorrow.”
“Julianna, huh?” I sighed.
Julianna and I had been theatre counterparts in high school, and we spent a lot of time together, so most people assumed we were unofficially together. We never were, although there was something between us. But in any event, we both grew up and went our separate ways. I went to law school, and she moved to New York, where she performed in a nude dance troupe and lived in a five way relationship.
Then a couple of months ago, she moved back to Sedona, and was accused of killing her former lover. We defended her, got her off on the charges, and remained professional the whole time.
But, when she and her current boyfriend casually invited Vicki and I to have group sex wth them, I knew things could get really weird if we didn’t keep our distance.
“We’ll see,” I said.
“Come on,” she said. “It will be fun.”
I grabbed her hand over the console as I drove and lightly brushed my tongue over her fingers.
“Or,” she said. “We could do that.”
I laughed. “Sounds like more fun than playing Headbanz, that’s for sure.”
We arrived back at the cottage perfectly timed for the sushi delivery. I signed for it, and we went inside.
“So what are we binging tonight?” Vicki asked as she slipped out of her work clothes.
“I don’t know,” I said as I unpacked the sushi boxes.
“I know,” her face brightened. “Let’s watch one of those house building shows on HGTV.”
“Are you kidding me right now?” I responded.
“Seriously,” she said. “You’ll be into it. I promise.”
She flipped it on, and I actually found it quite mesmerizing.
“I had no idea you could do a window seat that way,” I said as I pulled out my phone. “Maybe I should text that to Jim.”
“No,” she stated firmly and took the phone out of my hand. “If we’re going to watch this, we have to leave poor Jim alone.”
I laughed and she tossed my phone onto the dresser. My phone was surgically attached to my person. No one in the world could or ever had dared to take my phone away from me. And yet, I didn’t care. This woman had done something to my head.
We curled up in bed and watched some home decorating show and ate sushi. I thought about what AJ said.
That we needed to be out and about in the social scene. She might have been right. But, laying here with Vicki it occurred to me that we were doing something far more important.
We were building a marriage.
Chapter 12
“We still don’t have anything concrete to go on,” AJ said. “A lot of loose ends that look suspicious.”
Vicki, AJ and I sat around our conference room, sipping coffee. This was our checkpoint meeting. A lot of times when these big cases got too muddled, we’d whiteboard out everything we knew to find out where to go with it.
AJ was at the whiteboard, and she was great at that mind mapping technique. Clouds, arrows, and multi-colored words. It worked for her, but I was more of a lists and bullet points in black kind of guy.
“What do we know?” I said.
“We know that Kelsi was arrested the day after James’ death because she was found to have elephant tusks in her backyard.”
She drew a quick elephant with a frowning face.
“That looks like the Republican elephant,” Vicki said.
“I know,” AJ said. “It’s an easy way to draw it.”
I scanned the original police report. A lot of times when we did these meetings, we would go back to the original source material and ask ourselves questions we already knew.
“And they knew this about the elephant tusks because...” I prompted.
“Because elephant tusks started showing up on the black market, and there was a tip from Irwin Montague that Kelsi was his supplier. And then they found tusk in her backyard.”
“And they know it wasn’t James’, or a plant because of the airline tag on the suitcase it was clearly smuggled into,” Vicki supplied.
“Right,” AJ said.
“So allegedly, “Vicki said. “While these tusks were in her backyard shed, James dies on local television.”
“Yeah,” AJ said. “What’s up with that? Did we ever find a cause of death on that?”
“We got the coroner’s report by accident,” I said. “But in the end, it’s not our circus, not our monkeys,” I said.
“Or our elephants,” AJ laughed at her own corny joke.
“Ugh,” Vicki threw a wadded up piece of paper at her and she laughed and dodged it.
“But we actually do think that the death and smuggling are related,” AJ clarified.
“We think that,” I said. “But we have no real reason to believe it. So we have to leave that part out for now.”
She drew a tombstone in the top corner with the name James, and a big question mark.
“We also know the whole band had just come back from Africa,” I said. “Where James had had a secret donation meeting with a wildlife charity.”
“Did we ever investigate them?” Vicki asked.
“I looked into them a little bit,” I said. “From what I can tell, they’re all on the up and up.”
“Let’s look further into them,” Vicki said. “I don’t like them.”
“I’ll do tha
t,” AJ said, and she jotted it down on her own notepad.
“Then there’s the guys in the band,” I said.
“Roy,” I said. “The manager.”
“Ugh,” AJ said. “That guy gives me pervy creeps.”
She drew a stick figure in a t-shirt and labeled it ‘Roy.’
“Roy has had a fling with Kelsi,” I said. “Used to manage her when she was younger. He also had a five year contract with James that he appears to have had no intention of honoring.”
AJ’s marker squeaked as she scribbled away on the whiteboard.
“Then there’s also Gary, the soft spoken one that tipped us off about Kelsi and Roy.”
“Why did he do that?” AJ asked.
“He said it’s because he cared about Kelsi and her kids and thought that he should tell us everything that was out of the ordinary on that trip,” I said.
“I don’t buy that,” Vicki motioned with her finger as she looked down at her notes. “I think he’s got some other motive.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“What if he’s got a thing for Kelsi?” she wondered.
“Hmm,” I said. “That reads more plausible than he just wants to set the record straight. But, how would outing her infidelity be in his interest?”
“Revenge, jealousy?” AJ brainstormed.
“So Gary’s jealous because Kelsi married James and cheated on him with Roy? Not likely.”
“Or maybe he wants to get back at Roy,” AJ theorized.
“Because Roy ruined Kelsi’s marriage?” I prompted. “I don’t see that one either.”
“Maybe he’s just dumb and really did just want to ‘set the record’ straight,” Vicki concluded.
I laughed. “Alright so we need to delve more into Gary’s motives. Let’s make a note of that and move on.”
“So there’s Roy, Gary, Steve and Tim,” AJ made a chart of stick figures.
“Let’s talk about Tim,” I said. “Hothead extraordinaire.”
“That’s the only thing we have about him,” AJ said.
Vicki tapped away on her tablet. “I forgot I ran background checks on all of these guys. Tim used to sell crystal meth.”
“He’s a drug dealer?” AJ was aghast.
“Smuggling,” I connected. “Drug dealing is smuggling. What if he changed from meth to elephant tusks?”
