Death Benefits (A Martin Billings Story Book 2)

by Ed Teja

  He took a business card from his shirt pocket and thrust it at me. "Before you go anywhere, especially an airport, please make certain you let me know. The number for my cellular phone is on the card so can reach me any time."

  I assured him that I would call. I noted that he was based in Cumaná. I knew his boss would be in Puerto La Cruz where the headquarters for the eastern region was located. But Comandante Sanchez had jurisdiction over Santa Fe.

  If I'd been in a playful mood, I could have tangled him up in a jurisdictional dispute, or at least threatened one, but it seldom pays to give people in charge of soldiers any smart comments or reasons to mistrust you.

  Guys with that much gold braid don't have a sense of humor, and the ones I knew about here didn't tend to need a reason to throw you in jail beyond wanting to teach you a lesson. Once you are in jail, getting out can be tricky.

  Having finished his questioning of the only bona fide suspect, he turned and strutted off down the beach, probably to interrogate some chicas. He resembled a proud peacock, or at least a policeman who had extracted a confession from a serial killer.

  Without much hope of her still being around after all this time, I took a look up toward the road. The girl with the skinny body and fancy camera had disappeared.

  "What are you looking for?" Rudy asked, walking up slowly.

  When I explained that I was looking for a pretty girl, he smiled. Now I was looking for something he could understand.

  I sketched out the details and he eagerly helped me ask around, talking to people who had seen her or might have talked to her. When we compared notes, we learned that the consensus was that she was certainly a journalist for a foreign newspaper, worked for an insurance company who would be paying a lot of money for the boat and that she was either a CIA spy or the owner of the boat that had burned.

  Add to that that she was definitely from either Columbia or Norway and you can see that our investigation produced a very extensive, intriguing and rather useless biography of the mystery lady.

  Having exhausted that avenue, I couldn't think of any other reason for hanging around the scene. By the time the boat cooled down enough to check it out, anything of value or interest would have been looted.

  Rudy and I each got one last expensive beer and launched the boat, heading back to Puerto La Cruz.

  # # #

  The entire trip back to the marina I had to endure an irritating, self-satisfied smile that Rudy wore with great satisfaction, if not actual pleasure. I wasn't sure if it was the fact that George was gone and would plague him no more, or that he had been correct in saying the trip was for nothing.

  Either way, it made for a long trip back to Puerto La Cruz.

  Finally, he pulled the boat in alongside the fuel dock in the marina. When we tied up, I climbed out and paid him for his work.

  Even though the size of my tip turned his smirk into a friendly (okay, friendlier) grin, it probably also reinforced his conviction of the stupidity of gringos. I didn't care about that as much as staying on his good side. I might need his help again sometime. He was a good boatman and knew the waters as well as Pierre had suggested.

  When he left, I stood to watch him roar out past the expensive motor launches stored in the marina, indifferent to the way his wake reared up under them, rocking them violently in their rented slips.

  I looked up at the nearly transparent blue sky, inhaled the salty air and decided to walk the short distance from the marina to the downtown offices of Mr. James Wong and the possibly late Mr. Clyde Walker, masters of import and export services.

  I had plenty of time. James was having Consuela keep the office open during its normal hours. Until things were settled with Walker, she was forwarding everything to him—phone calls, faxes—all of it.

  He would deal with whatever wheeling and dealing, schmoozing and wining and dining were needed to keep the business happening. Besides, with Walker more seriously in absentia, I would need a base of operations that was slightly better than my sleazy hotel.

  James wasn't just keeping up pretenses, though. In his business, staffs were small and meetings erratic. He should be able to pull off the charade that things were normal. No one would notice anything at all funny going on for quite some time unless they insisted on talking to Walker directly. Even those people could be stalled by telling them he was on vacation or a business trip.

  Most people would either settle for dealing directly with James or just go to a competitor. The good part was that with everything passing through his hands, he had a better chance of finding out where he stood, what problems he might have on the horizon.

  The invigorating walk raised my spirits considerably. It was one of those gorgeous Venezuelan afternoons that make you wonder why everyone doesn't live here; of course, at the same time, you are glad they don't. It would destroy the ambiance.

  Puerto La Cruz is seldom crowded, and that is one of its joys. Strolling down the sidewalks at a leisurely pace with the thermometer just teasing 75 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale is a delight.

  ###

  Consuela put a call through to James for me. Not wanting to make a big deal out of what I'd learned, I told her to listen in on the other phone.

  "I don't have anything secret to tell him," I said. "I know you want to know what is going on, so if you listen in, you'll find out and I won't have to repeat it all to you later. I bore myself enough when I'm trying to say new things."

  When James came on the line, I warned him that Consuela was listening in and gave him the abbreviated version of my cruise along the northern coast—it was the entire story but in a highly condensed, Reader's Digest version, with no frills, embellishments or opinions. I even refrained from bitching about Rudy's surliness.

  Unfortunately, it all sounded pretty simple when I heard myself telling the story, as all I could honestly tell the man was that I had gone looking for Walker, come across his boat burning on the beach and that I had seen no sign of any human life forms that might be Walker, either alive or dead.

  For further information, we pretty much had to wait for the police report and that wouldn't extend beyond whatever bits of burned flesh they managed to identify.

  I didn't mention the mysterious photographer. I'm not certain why I left her out. But what did I know that I could tell him? Hearing about her wasn't useful to him and I couldn't even say why her presence had bothered me, why I thought it odd for a curious gringa to be a bit camera happy at the scene of an accident, or incident, or whatever the hell it was.

  She could be a tourist who had been passing by. It bothered me just the same. Perhaps it just seemed too coincidental.

  When I finished telling James that I didn't know very much about very much, he asked Consuela to hang up so we could talk. Once he heard her click off he was unkind enough to point out the major deficiencies in my report.

  "You didn't learn much," is what he actually said.

  "Actually, now I know as much as anyone else does," I told him huffily. "I know more than you, for example. And if you don't think I know anything worth knowing, why do you keep asking me questions? I'd think you'd ask someone who knew something. If you want to insult me, it's cheaper for me to fly up there. We can insult each other over a bottle of cheap rum. You'd save the cost of me scouting out, in my lazy and inefficient way, the little bit of information that is lying on the streets down here."

  He took a breath. "All right; calm down. I am just frustrated. This situation with Walker, not knowing if he is alive or dead makes it impossible to do business."

  Then I remembered he didn't know what Simon had told me. So I filled him in on that meeting.

  "Things just seem to be getting worse all the time," he said. "That means that other people might be thinking I am involved."

  "Not from what Simon told me," I said. "He knew that it was something Walker was doing on the side with his boss."

  "Still, I have a bad feeling. I need to w
rap this up quickly. I know we hit a dead end in this search, but I need you to start on the backup plan."

  "Backup plan?"

  "If he's dead, then you won't get him to sign and closing the office will get complicated. So, I need you to track down Evelyn, his wife. I hope she hasn't disappeared too."

  "Why? I mean I'm pretty sure she is in Margarita. What more do you need?"

  "Make sure. If Clyde really is dead, then I can approach her about accepting the buyout in his place and that would tie up the loose ends."

  "Ah, she gets a death benefit in the form of his payment."

  "I suppose that is a form of death benefit, yes."

  "That sounds like motive. So, I guess you want me to find her and sound her out?"

  "Yes; and keep digging to see if Walker didn't pull a fast one somehow. Stay on the cops and see if they learn anything."

  "This is Venezuela, James. You don't just blow into the local cop shop and ask to see the files under some freedom of information thing."

  "So, kiss their asses. Take a big shot cop to dinner on my dime. Get the head cop drunk or laid. Or both. If you can't motivate him, start in on his number two guy."

  I laughed at that. "You do understand Venezuela a little then."

  "Enough," he agreed sourly. "I knew enough to know that I never wanted to have an office there in the first place. It was Walker's idea. He knew the ropes, he said."

  "But it clearly wasn't working."

  "Hell no. But at first, it was just the local turn down in the economy. These days, who in Venezuela has a thriving business? With customs duties on imports averaging around sixty-five percent, not counting bribes, we didn't get a lot of action."

  "I noticed that from the lack of paperwork to read through in my spare time."

  "Anyway, keep after it. Help me out with this. Please?"

  "James, I'm not going to investigate his death for you, if it turns out he is dead."

  "No one is asking you to," he said impatiently. "Just find out if he is dead or if he skipped out. And if he is alive, get him to sign those papers. If not, we need Evelyn ready to sign."

  "I'll talk to Simon as well."

  "Be cautious in what you say." He hesitated. "Look, if he was involved in some kind of deal that went bad, we don't know who it was. Saying it is a mob doesn't mean much. If things were getting out of hand and if he isn't dead...maybe he had some bogus documents made up and ran off."

  I sighed. "Without the money?"

  "Maybe he was stalling me while he had some papers made. I mean, if he was using the office, he wouldn't want it closed until he had everything set up. Maybe he took off with the money and burned the boat so everyone there would think he was dead. Also, then his wife wouldn't stumble into learning that he was coming into money. He wouldn't expect me to know about the boat and I don't talk to her often. Then, when he gets a new passport, he can sign the papers and take off, while I close things down."

  "It makes as much sense as anything else I've heard. Simon said he was checking that angle out, but I'll pursue it."

  "Please keep asking. Somebody, somewhere, must've seen something. Clyde wasn't exactly inconspicuous. He liked a high-profile lifestyle and I don't see him disappearing without a trace."

  "I will James, but most people don't pay attention to gringos down here. They have more important things to do, like fishing and drinking."

  "I just hope Walker didn't take the money," he said. "These people have a tendency to hold associates responsible for debts that are otherwise uncollectable. And we don't even know how much we are talking about here.

  The edge in his voice told me he was really worried. "I guess that might be worth a certain amount of concern," I said. I felt a bit of a chill myself. I had no interest in getting mixed up in some kind of serious trouble, especially not the life and death kind or the kind that gets an entire government pissed off at you. "Of course, we only have Simon's word that there was any money at all."

  "That's true," he said, sounding brighter.

  "I'll find out what I can, James and as quickly as possible. Venezuela doesn't seem to be as friendly a place as I remembered it."

  "No," he said, sounding subdued. "It doesn't."

  He hung up an unhappy man. With friends, you can tell these things.

  When I finished the call, Consuela came in. "I feel bad for Señor Wong. He has treated me nicely." She smiled. "When I learned you were coming down here, I thought you would be taking over the office, running things." She bit her lip. "But you are not a businessman and the office must close?"

  I laughed. "No. I never even learned to be comfortable in a suit," I told her. "In real life, I am the Captain of a coastal freighter. I run cargo from Trinidad and Venezuela to Grenada or Bequia and back again."

  She looked disappointed. "You won't stay and run the office?"

  I wondered what was going through her head. Maybe she was just worried that if Walker didn't come back that she might be out of a job. It wouldn't be an unreasonable concern. But I couldn't help her.

  "Not this lad. Even if there was enough business for that to make sense, I wouldn't know where to start. I only came to find Walker. He might still be out there somewhere. He might be in trouble and need help, or he might be hiding. If you want to help, I need you to sit down and tell me what you know about your boss."

  She frowned but sat. "I know so little. Certainly nothing useful."

  She had suddenly shifted into a "little girl in the principal's office" tone of voice. It was well done, and I had to remind myself that the women here are fantastic role players. It's part of the culture for a woman to play little girl to a man. It was something I found off-putting myself.

  I think that a woman, especially one who is trying to look sexy, should act like a woman, rather than a girl.

  "Señor Walker hired me three weeks ago. I think his wife was doing the office work at first, but she grew bored."

  "Tell me about him."

  "He seemed nice enough. Distant though. He talked only of business."

  That surprised me. I assumed that, as a lady's man, he would have made a play for this lovely lady. But some men are at least clever enough, or maybe just sneaky enough, to not dip into the office pool. Maybe he was one of those. "Did he keep a journal or appointment calendar of some kind?"

  "Of course. He had one of those new electronic things from Miami. He always had it with him. He stored telephone numbers and appointments in it. He called it his brain and never let it out of his sight." Then she brightened. "He has a company car. It must still be in the garage across the street, because I have the keys."

  "That's good news. Having transportation could make life easier. And who knows, maybe he left his itinerary in it."

  She breezed back to her desk and returned with the keys and the plastic credit card that let you in and out of the garage. She put them in my hand and her touch did not help me focus on the job at hand. I put the keys and card in my pocket.

  As a matter of routine, I put in a call to the US Embassy in Caracas, the capital city. I wanted to see if they knew anything. He might have applied for a new passport, or simply be in Caracas renewing his work papers—his residencia.

  Although this was during normal office hours, all I got was a recording telling me when they were open, and one of those annoying beeps that preface the blank tape where you can leave a message.

  I left a message, with the office phone number. When I hung up, I kissed that idea goodbye. So much for going through official channels.

  Overseas embassies are seldom any help at all to normal people. Sure, if you are a major oil company with 46 expat employees, they are quick to provide assistance, but for the average person, they don't do a great deal.

  No, that is unfair. The issue advisories, they remind you what not to do, and they soak up tax dollars. They just don't do anything useful.

  # # #

  With a shortage of angles
to play, I rummaged around in Walker's desk again. It makes me uncomfortable shuffling through someone's personal space, especially when I am just looking at everything in the hope that I would stumble across something that would explain all that was wrong in the universe.

  The desk was just as empty as the first time I'd looked. At least there was no note saying: "Hey, I skipped with the cash for Belize." And there was no sign of Walker's electronic brain.

  I figured that there were probably tons of clues lying there, tucked away in some drawer, maybe in a hidden compartment, or even in plain sight. Not being a real detective, I needed clues that jump out at you, hit you square between the eyes. A body, for instance. Clyde Walker had not been helpful that way.

  If he was dead, he had omitted that rather customary step. I began to think of him as an inconsiderate person.

  But now, if asked, I could now tell James that I had gone through the desk, examining it for clues to the man's whereabouts. That part did feel good.

  I did find a photo I hadn't seen before. On the corner of the desk, in a cheap frame, was a picture of a couple I assumed were the Walkers, standing on their now-charred boat. It looked new in the picture. So, did they. They were all dressed in up-market white boating clothes—the kind of clothing real sailors never wear.

  It wasn't a great photo. The sun had been coming too much from behind them, and I'd give it a c minus on composition, but it showed their faces clearly. I took it out of the frame. There was no date on it, but seeing it, they looked pretty much like I remembered them from when I'd met them in Grenada.

  I gave it to Consuela and had her run it down to a photo shop to get twenty copies made. I wanted her to send one to the Guardia in case they cared. The rest I planned to show people who it was I was looking for. Although I had recognized them in the photo, I couldn't have given you a description of them to save my soul.

  Most business offices in Venezuela close at five. I suspect this is because sunset is always at six-thirty, although why that would matter is less clear. Consuela closed up the office. I waited around while she double locked the doors, then secured them with a chain that ran through the door handles and made it fast with a large padlock.