by Chris Knopf
She took the map.
“That’s the maintenance shed. You maintenance?”
“I am. I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I’m here to work on an addition for the hacienda. What do you need maintaining?”
“My self-control, unless someone from on high fixes the damn thermostat in the nurses’ quarters. Parboiled brains make for lousy caregivers.”
“Take me to the shed and I’ll look at the thermostat. No guarantees.”
She came around to the passenger side and got in.
“You can fix it by looking at it?” she asked.
“That’s stage one. We’ll take it from there.”
Closer up she was more of a grey-blonde—straight, unmanaged hair pulled back by a fabric-covered barrette. Weathered skin, pale blue eyes like Jackie Swaitkowski’s. And like Jackie, hovering in that border territory between young and not-so-young anymore.
The roadway curved between low-slung, cinder-block buildings with flat concrete roofs, which helped explain their durability. Each was labeled with a big number and the name of a local bird: Pitirre, Guaraguao, Reinita, Zorzal, Chango, and so on.
More kids and presumably their grownups were milling around, kicking soccer balls and wielding plastic baseball bats, chasing each other with the random logic of universal childhood.
“Are you one of the sweltering nurses?” I asked.
“I’m their supervisor. Much worse.”
“How long have you had the problem?”
“Pre-Maria,” she said. “Which is to say, a million years ago.”
“I started last week.”
“So I don’t blame you.”
“Please don’t.”
She directed me to the shed with hand signals. On the way we passed the pool, filled to the brim with Loventeers beneficiaries. Next to that was a large eating area covered by a metal frame protected by taped-together blue tarps, under which people were served some type of stew from large cauldrons.
“You look after a lot of people,” I said to the woman.
“It’s what we’re here to do. Most of us anyway.”
“Who do the others look after?”
“Themselves.”
The impact drill was where Ramon said it would be. I also picked up a few tools I might need to work on the nurses’ thermostat.
“Do you have a name?” the woman asked me.
“Sam Acquillo. Though up at the hacienda they think I’m Carlito Montaño,” I said, feeling the honesty gushing from me in a single cleansing release.
“I’m Charlotte Ensler. Everywhere.”
I don’t know why I felt full trust in her from the moment I saw her walking along the gravel road, or if it had more to do with my own state of mind, which had been strained to the breaking point by maintaining an artifice. It wasn’t that I was committed to saintly rectitude, I just never saw much advantage in misrepresenting myself. I always felt if you didn’t like something about the way I was, that was either my fault, or yours, and either way, I could give a damn.
“Why Carlito?” she asked.
“I rented his Jeep. If they checked the plates, I needed to have the same name.”
“I’m sure that’s not the only reason.”
I didn’t know how to explain further without feeling ridiculous. On the other hand, once you start babbling the truth, it’s hard to stop.
“I’m nosing around the Loventeers as part of an investigation. I work for a defense attorney back on Long Island.” I gave her the broad outlines of my signing up for the construction job the week before after a brief stop in Condado where I secured the Wrangler courtesy of Slippery Slope and his good friend Drunk Carlito. I left out everything that came before.
“It’d be swell if you kept all that to yourself,” I said.
“Why are you telling me?”
“I’m trying to figure that out myself. Guess I’m tired of speaking Spanish.”
She laughed.
“I’m tired of switching back and forth. After four years of this, the novelty wears off.”
We arrived at the nurses’ dorm. She led me to the thermostat, a commercial version behind a locked plastic box, which she slapped open with the palm of her hand, then waved me forward.
“I’m assuming private investigators know something about thermostats,” she said.
“I knew the guys who ran the company that made this thing. Capable, but not much imagination.”
I fiddled around for a moment and knew immediately what the problem was.
I unscrewed the face and dug around the delicate wires until I felt the culprit. I pulled it out and showed Charlotte.
“A battery?” she asked.
“We just did the easy part. The hard part is getting a replacement.”
“Shit.”
I told her I could have one by the end of the day, but she’d have to let me feed her dinner if she had any hope of getting it.
“Isn’t that extortion?”
“Fair trade. Do you have a car?”
“I can borrow one.”
I fiddled with my smartphone until I came up with a restaurant that seemed as safe as any.
“Can you meet me there?” I asked.
“Will you be interrogating me?” she asked.
“I will. After plying you with the drink of your choice.”
“Or drinks.”
I put the thermostat back together and let her affix the plastic cover. Then I went back to put in at least part of a good day’s work.
THE PLACE I picked was about twenty miles by car and a light-year of socioeconomic status away from El Rancho de Velilla. Open on three sides with a massive bar made of carved tropical wood anchoring the fourth, there were views of the Caribbean from nearly every angle, and the trade winds stirred the air to perfection.
The tourist trade, so vital to Puerto Rico’s survival, created plenty of ironies. One being the existence of places like this, featured in magazines catering to the ultra-rich, cheek by jowl with unrelenting poverty. The roads leading there were just as beat up as anywhere else in the mountains, but the parking lot still had its share of Mercedes SUVs and Land Rovers. Proving the wealthy will go anywhere for a four-star dinner, if only to brag about it later.
I felt a little out of place in the wardrobe department. All I had with me were blue jeans, but I’d shaved and put on my best black T-shirt. Charlotte was waiting at the bar, not much more decked out than I was in a buttoned-down collar shirt, tan skirt, and sandals. She said she was glad I’d shown up, since she’d already invested my money in a piña colada and was about to up the ante. I moved us to the table I’d reserved at the edge of the patio so we could have an unobstructed view. An Absolut on the rocks and her second drink followed soon behind.
“Thanks for coming,” I said, after a casual toast.
“Months of nothing but around-the-clock shifts tending to stressed-out nurses as they look after sick, desperate people, and some private eye appears out of nowhere to ask me out to dinner at the most expensive place in a hundred miles. Hmm, tough decision.”
My native social skills were one of my ex-wife’s first crushing disappointments. As a young engineer they didn’t matter that much. Abby was happy to carry the load at neighborhood functions since her taciturn husband hanging around the bar looking unapproachable carried no real penalty. But after I started the upward corporate trajectory and we got invited to business gatherings by guys with titles that made Abby almost lick her chops, it became an issue.
Having grown up blue collar, then schooled in technology, with some finishing touches courtesy of amateur and professional boxing, I’d never heard of small talk much less knew how to do it. Nor cared, not a whit.
“It’s not that hard,” Abby would tell me.
“For you. You actually think all that mindless blather is fun.”
“You don’t have to say to be in a conversation.”
“What does that mean?”
“You just have to ask.”
It turned out to be good advice. Whenever I was alarmed by the threat of social interaction, I’d just start to ask questions. In the process, I learned that people liked being interviewed, that nothing was more satisfying than talking about themselves.
“So what brought you down here?” I asked Charlotte.
“A divorce, what else?”
She’d married her husband while he was still in medical school in a moment of what she called temporary insanity. Even though her life as a nurse proved conclusively that most male doctors were assholes, she thought she was brilliant enough to see through her beloved’s imperious exterior to the benevolent and sensitive soul within.
“You can guess how that turned out,” she said.
To be fair to her husband, she told me, she had other reasons for feeling existential dread, a prevailing sense of worthlessness and lack of meaning in the world. The cure for that, she felt, was either to drown herself in substance abuse or retreat to a nunnery for a lifetime of penitence and prayer.
“So I split the difference and joined an overseas NGO where they let you drink. Cheers.”
I asked her about the staff paying their own way, one of the claims made on the Loventeers’ website. It made her laugh.
“I know, right? We pay for the privilege of putting ourselves through all this impossible bullshit. Stupid.”
“Generous?”
“I told you my ex is a doctor. My price for letting him out of the marriage.”
Not to give me a false impression, she said the work had been totally redemptive, with enough personal satisfaction and fulfillment to last a lifetime. Every day she saw men, women, and children who wouldn’t have survived if it hadn’t been for her and the crew she led. She’d committed to a total of five years, so with four under her belt, she’d soon be on to something else.
“Like what?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Wall Street?”
I asked her what it was like to work for the Loventeers. She said it depended on which Loventeers I was talking about. There were the social workers and medical staff at the Caring Center, to whom she was devoted, and then the administrative people on top of the hill, and the twain had yet to meet.
“I have no idea what those people do. Every year, the practice supervisors submit a budget, they give us less than we need, and that’s the last we hear from them till the next year.”
“What about Daniel Osterman?” I asked.
“Who’s he?”
“The executive director of the La Selva Bendita campus.”
“No kidding. His predecessor killed herself. Must have been a tough recruiting process.”
“Did you know her?” I asked.
She leaned into the table.
“I did actually. Had a big head of white hair, which I admired. A superficial thing to remember, I know. She was the only one of those hacienda people who ever came down to talk to us. Had a bit of spark. Spent a long time in the nursery with the orphan babies.”
“How did she die?” I asked.
“Jumped off one of our lovely jungle cliffs. It was only a few months ago. We only knew because the Puerto Ricans working with us read it in the local paper.”
“When she visited the Caring Center, was she on her own?”
“I didn’t see anyone else from up on the hill. I honestly didn’t think much about it. There’s so much to keep track of every day it’s all-consuming.”
“How do people qualify to be cared for here? Do they turn up at your gate?”
“No, they have to go through an office in downtown La Selva Bendita. I meant that as a joke. Downtown is some beat-up-looking gas station, a rusted-out water tank, tumbled-down fritter joint, and the Loventeers’ concrete box where people wait outside before going in one at a time to get qualified, which can take weeks. I’ve only been there once. Won’t go back. Too depressing.”
I tried to keep the questioning momentum going after that, but she got wise to me and turned the tables. I first told her I was also divorced but had a steady girlfriend who lived next door. Then I had to confess I was only a private investigator because my friend Jackie Swaitkowski made me get certified so the cops wouldn’t bust us for obstructing justice. Then I talked about the charge against Burton Lewis for killing Elton Darby, the chief fund-raiser for Worldwide Loventeers, though no more than she could have read in the media through a simple Google search. I said a visit to one of their field operations was just a routine part of our work for Burton.
“As an undercover carpenter?” she asked.
“Stick with what you know.”
“I have a feeling you’ve done other things.”
“A little large-scale hydrocarbon processing for a global engineering firm, but you have to start out somewhere.”
We were in the parking lot after dinner about to go our separate ways when I remembered to close our deal. I took the battery out of my pocket to show her.
“Where did you get it?” she asked.
I’d noticed a utility room the first time Ramon and I went through the back door to the hacienda. Assuming they used the same HVAC equipment as the Caring Center, there should have been a discrete cooling system for the air handlers that would have its own thermostatic control. After Ramon left for the day, I proved the theory.
“Won’t that shut down their air conditioning?” she asked.
“More’s the pity. I’ll come down there tomorrow and stick it in. Should work for at least a year.”
I got an enthusiastic kiss on the lips, which wasn’t part of the deal, but every negotiation takes unexpected turns.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I waited a few days for the vodka to filter out of my system before breaking into the hacienda. I also used the time to locate all the security cameras, I hoped, and find lapses in coverage. I’d installed similar systems and knew the difficulty in keeping every square inch in view. But I was also handicapped by the need to look like a guy just ambling around on a cigarette break, so it took both nights and about a half pack of smokes to complete the assessment.
What any good security breach needs is a diversion. I found a promising candidate at the security hut guarding the front gate. The installers had run the coaxial cable from the conspicuously menacing camera on the upper corner of the gate through an eight-foot metal conduit. However, the distance from corner to ground was more like eight feet, two inches, leaving a small section of black cable fully exposed.
The rear of the hut was also conveniently located within a few feet of the natural foliage, thick, but easily passable. So, at about two A.M., I took a brief, deliberate, and I hoped silent, walk in the woods. My greatest ally in this was the incessant, chirpy racket from the coqui. I wore a jacket, baseball cap, and pack on my back, all black. I’d rubbed some dark topsoil on my face and hands, on which I also wore surgical gloves. When I reached the building, I crouched down and waited about ten minutes before crawling on my belly over to the exposed cable and snipping it with a pair of wire cutters.
Within seconds, I could hear the guard calling back to the monitoring room in the hacienda reporting the failure, something the guy in the room would know simultaneously as his own front-gate monitor winked to black. I did a fast crawl back into the underbrush where I lay still to see what would happen next.
Soon the front gate guard was outside looking up at the camera, making the natural assumption that some electronic trouble had caused the outage. A vehicle soon arrived bringing what I hoped was the guy from the hacienda so two of them could stare dumbly up at the camera, as if strength in numbers would fix the problem.
Moving as quickly and quietly as possible, I retraced my steps to the hacienda where I followed my planned route to the ground floor, which was utterly obscured by the landscaping, and I hoped overlooked by the security system.
Squatting down next to the building, I waited again for signs that I’d been spotted. Things like flashlight beams, yells, and wa
ving sidearms. But all I heard were a billion coquis and whatever else was out there competing for love and sustenance.
I felt along the wall for the access door I’d scoped out in the daylight. It was a single-panel, metal-sheathed door with a common exterior lock, a brand I’d learned to pick during some long-ago act of juvenile delinquency. Since most breaking and entering involved just that, a lot of breaking of doors and dead bolts, there’d been few advancements in the design of the locks themselves. It wasn’t my personal best for speed of entry, but it wasn’t long before I felt the satisfying turn of the handle.
I’d seen no evidence of alarm sensors at individual windows and doors, probably considered an unneeded expense given the cameras and armed security detail. So far, I was right. The door opened into a darkly lit hallway that led to a stairwell up to the second floor where all the action was.
First I had to make an important stop. At the other end of the hall was the utility room where I’d pilfered Charlotte’s new thermostat battery. In addition to the HVAC system, there was other important equipment, such as the telecommunications hub, computer servers, and most important of all, the electrical panel.
I unscrewed the big faceplate so I could get to all the wiring. I followed the heavy gauge lines from the main breakers to where they entered from the bottom of the panel. Using a box cutter, I sliced the insulation around the bundle and identified the principal ground wire. Then I reinstalled the faceplate, and with wire snips in hand, prepared myself for the impending total blackout.
The hallway was carpeted and I wore rubber-soled boots, but my footfalls still sounded horribly loud, though this was a time for speed over stealth. Using the back of my hand against the wall to guide my progress, I trotted to the stairwell and went up to the second-floor office area.
Now it had to be all by memory. I had a panicky moment of disorientation until I found the big open room filled by day with the young telemarketers. From there, I could feel my way to the hall that led to the director’s office, and adjacent, the office of Ruth Bellingham.
I ‘d just shut the door to her office behind me when the shouting started. It came from inside the building, but not in close proximity. I set to fast work.
