X Dames: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 3)

by J. J. Henderson

  Attempting to get a grip, Lucy sat back, closed her eyes to shut out the faces of her fellow passengers—surfers in big shorts and earnest eco-tourists draped in moss-colored clothes occupied most of the cheap seats, along with a few seedy-looking Costa Rican businessmen—and contemplated the short, circuitous path that had gotten her here, enplaned, en route, flush with cash, jetting away from her recently bookish life in SoHo.

  It had started innocently enough with that first call from Consuela Reynoso. Lucy was strolling down Broadway, homeward-bound, when her cell played its tune. “Lucy here. Who’s calling?”

  “Consuela!” Lucy drew a blank. “Connie Reynoso! Hey, it’s been a while, girl, but not so long you shouldn’t know my voice.”

  “Connie! My God! How are you?” Lucy had met her on a press trip to San Juan, Puerto Rico, eight or nine years back. That first day in San Juan, flown down to check out a posh new hotel on Condado Beach, they’d sweated through bowls of hot Stilton cheese soup followed by roast pork in the scorching tropical sun, a gourmet nightmare courtesy of some lame PR agency and the hotel’s new fresh-off-the-boat chef, who cooked like he thought he was still in dark, dank London. Afterwards they started drinking and ended up in Consuela’s room downing Mojitos till the wee hours, sharing their single-in-Manhattan secrets. Consuela had been an editor at Travel for Pleasure, and Lucy was just getting started as a freelancer, covering the hotel opening for one of the trade mags. Lucy had never worked for Consuela, but they had bonded and stayed in touch, however sporadically. “Sorry, Connie, this phone’s all crackle and snap. But it’s great to hear your voice. Hey, what’s up?”

  “I heard things were a little slow since your last Mexican venture, Luce,” she said. “Although I must say I did like the way you played yourself on TV.”

  “I am pretty good at being me, I guess,” Lucy said. “Someone’s got to do it.”

  “But seriously, you and that MacDonald woman did a great job on that project. That was a hell of a story. I heard about how they actually busted a couple of your “bad guys” down there.”

  “Yes, but not the one I really wanted to nail.”

  “The Verde woman?”

  “You got it.”

  “Well, maybe you’ll run into her on your next project. Or should I say my next project?”

  “What’s that? What’s up?”

  “Well, listen. I know this is a little different for you, but since you got your book out and did your TV movie I’m able to sell you—to my bosses I mean—as a somewhat serious player, and not just another half-starved magazine hack. So I’ll cut to the chase: do you have any interest in working on a guidebook to Colombia?”

  “Colombia? Land of narco-cartels and terrorist assassins? I don’t think so.” Even as she reflexively turned it down Lucy was thinking, God, it can’t be that bad down there, and what a gas it would be to work in Latin America! She’d never been farther south than Oaxaca. “I don’t know. Let me think about it and call you back.” Maybe she’d even run into Maria Verde somewhere over the lost horizon of the Andes—and have the pleasure of clawing her eyes out.

  “Today, OK? I need to get this assignment nailed down before I leave here tonight.”

  “Where’s here? Where are you?”

  “At Grunwald’s. You know, Grunwald’s Get Going, guidebooks to every stinking country on earth. I’m the editor for Latin America since last May. We need some fresh eyeballs to do the bi-annual update on Colombia. Thought of you down there in the frigid precincts of SoHo, irritated at the cold and the crowds, probably itching for an excuse to go south what with winter coming on.”

  “You know, I’ve become a bit of a shut-in, Connie. Really. I mean, if I didn’t have to walk the dog I’d probably never go out the door.”

  “New York does that to you, doesn’t it?” Consuela answered.

  Lucy stopped, suddenly resolved, and got whacked by a man speeding south in a suit and sneakers. He barked at her, she cursed at him, and then she returned to the phone. “Yes. New York, bad trips south of the border, and God knows what else. And the truth is, Colombia isn’t a place I want to go. I don’t want to hang you up, so you should definitely look for someone else. But please, don’t write me off. I could do another country, you know, some place a bit more civilized. Let me know if something comes up.” Lucy did love getting out of New York, and she did love the sun.

  “Will do. So truthfully, things are OK? I know that X Dames thing must have been rough.”

  “Yes, it was. But I’m ready for another out-of-towner. A safe one I mean. I haven’t crossed a border since the Dames. It would be nice to see a country other than Manhattan or Mexico. Only one without drug lords in the mix, eh?”

  “I’ll keep you in mind.”

  “Thanks, Consuela. Hey, how are things going with—um—your new…”

  “Lucien?”

  “Right. Lucien.” Last time they’d spoken Consuela had just broken up with an editor at the Wall Street Journal who turned out to be a cokehead and a girlfriend hitter. Consuela was famous among her pals for bad choices in men. But Lucy had heard from mutual friends that Connie at last had landed a good one.

  “Actually it’s great. He’s a bearded Brit, a computer geek who came into our office to update the systems. He’s low-keyed to the point of atrophy, but we’ve been together eight months now and we’re still having fun.”

  “That’s wonderful news!” It was. In spite of her striking, Latin temptress-gone-corporate good looks, or maybe because of them, Consuela had long occupied a place on Lucy’s mental list of friends most likely to end up alone. Maybe she could beat the rap. Maybe she had beat it! Lucy had, sort of. Why couldn’t Consuela? “I’m so glad.”

  “Ain’t love grand,” said Connie dryly. “Well, listen, I’ll let you go. Something comes up I’ll get in touch. You got email?”

  “LucyRips at ragtime dot com,” Lucy said.

  “I’ll put you in my computer. Bye for now,” said Consuela. Then she hung up and that was that, thought Lucy, heading home to walk the dog and wonder what next.

  Six days later, what next arrived in the form of an e-mail.. “Would you consider Costa Rica? Call for details. Consuela.” Lucy called, and liked what she heard enough to go for it. Three weeks in-country. Grunwald would cover air fare; they would also provide Lucy with a letter anointing her as a Grunwald writer/editor. It would be up to her to use said letter to scrounge rooms and meals. Or pay for them herself. On top of that, five thousand bucks. The pay sucked, she’d made that every week on the X Dames. But Lucy had dreamed of going to Costa Rica for years. Plus it wasn’t TV. And the X Dames money after all had been e-ripped right out of her bank account by none other than her nemesis, Maria Verde. Truth was, she was damn near broke again.

  “What a crappy deal,” was Harold’s initial response. “I can’t believe they make you cover your own expenses. That fee money will be gone before you get home.”

  “No way, Harry,” said Lucy, though initially she’d said the same thing to Consuela. “Grunwald’s a major player in the tourist biz. The hotel people will roll out the red carpet.” So Consuela had promised her. She hoped it was true. Otherwise, she figured she’d probably come out a couple thousand ahead, depending on how well she treated herself on the road. Not much for six weeks’ work—three there, three writing it up when she got back. But she was tired of asking Harold to cover her—the hundred-and-fifty grand in dead man’s drug money he’d dug out of a hole in the Florida ground was going fast, and a couple of thousand of her own would stave off the wolves for a month or two. Plus it would be a nice break from book anxiety, and from the oncoming New York winter. And she might find something more than a guidebook to write, who knew?

  Mostly she liked the deal because she got to go to Costa Rica, see the country, and get paid while she wandered. The guidebook work would give her a focus, and she could plan her own adventures around it. Windsurfing, rafting, hiking, and best of all, surfing. She’d had a taste in
Sayulita, and loved it. Maybe there was a story in that: approaching middle age, woman takes up surfing. It changes her life.

  Forget that one: she’d already seen it, in at least six different women’s magazines. But she did like wave-riding, and pint-sized Costa Rica was said to be abundantly full of good surf.

  And home to more species of birds that your average continent. Birdwatching! Now there was a sport she could sink her binoculars into, as middle age relentlessly chased her down the road.

  The guidebook work wasn’t so complicated, either. Adding new chapters on excursions to Panama and Nicaragua would be just enough of a challenge to get her creative juices going, according to Consuela And her pal Mickey, who’d done several Caribbean guidebooks, told her guidebook update jobs were mostly automatic pilot work, verifying hotel and restaurant listings, throwing out places that had gone out of business, and adding new ones. Not exactly composing the Great American Novel, or even the Great Central American Travel Guide, but paid-for-writing work in a semi-exotic location nonetheless. Costa Rica had good phones and email and a reliable bus system. She figured she’d do without a car for two weeks, keep it cheap with her feet on the ground, then splurge on a rental the last week.

  That had been the plan. And then, after she’d scheduled the flights, scrutinized every line of her guidebook, cross-referenced it with five other Costa Rican guidebooks, emailed a dozen hotels to line up rooms, and otherwise done all the advance work she could, Harold announced that they needed to have a dinner party before she left. “For your posse to say goodbye,” he said.

  The guest list for the party included Harold as cook and host; Mickey Wolfe, her travel writer friend; Rosa DeLuxe and her sometime beau, the insurance man Kelly Wyatt she’d been dating since the Precolombian caper; Coco Jones and Fred Long, a pair of married lawyers who ran their own Tribeca firm, with an emphasis on environmental activism; Marcia Hobgood, her young surfer pal, moved out from LA to attend Pratt Art Institute, and Maggie Clements, who flew into town just for the party, she said. When she heard that, Lucy should have known, since Maggie lived in London and Nairobi these days and would hardly come to New York for a dinner party unless something was up.

  Lucy’s crew shared her generally liberal, humanistic sensibility. What they also shared was a dirty little secret that Lucy discovered over dinner and eight or ten—nobody was counting—bottles of wine that night. Following Rosa and Harold’s lead in the brazen scheme they had decided that Lucy was going to take a chunk of their money and put it down on a hotel or a restaurant or some land or a beach house or something—something cool, something real, something sweet—in Costa Rica. Each of the investors, even Marcia, who still had some of her X Dames surfing contest winnings in the bank, had anted up from two to twenty thousand bucks, for a grand total of one hundred large in start-up cash, with more to come, as required, from the big spenders.

  While seasoned travelers all, they had decided that Lucy best combined overseas savvy with common sense. She also had no money to spare—her share would be covered by the work she did, figuring out where to spend the money.

  In this clever fashion—choosing her to do the investment search—they had dragooned her into the operation. Nice compliment, that confidence placed in her, but at the dinner party initially she had been taken aback—stunned, actually—when Harold grandly announced the plan. But two minutes into his riff on the thing, in her half-drunk state she decided it was a splendid idea. Consider, he said: the U.S. stock market sucks these days. Costa Rica’s stable, democratic, de-militarized, more or less gringo-friendly, why not get a piece of it while our pitiful shrinking dollars still have some value? We’re sharing the risk so it isn’t that much for any one of us. And we all know Lucy won’t make any wrong moves, he said, putting an arm around her. She’s way too smart for that. She smiled and shrugged, as if to say, no problem.

  All of these remarks were disputable half-truths; and furthermore, the notion was preposterous: money was too private, too personal, too valuable for this sort of thing. Investing with friends was a recipe for disaster. And though she did believe herself to be a fairly smart girl, she’d never been one for making money. With the X Dames, she’d finally landed that high-paying dream job, only to lose it after two weeks—and then lose the little money she did make to the despicable Maria Verde. Basically, the deal was you had to have money to make money, and she’d never had any. Nevertheless, Harold’s logic, and the flowing wine, and their shared liberal guilt at having money in the first place added up to a suddenly attractive collective fantasy that it was a great plan to move some cash to the Rich Coast.

  Her last few days prior to leaving, worrying about the money had been overshadowed by prepping for the trip, and so it had stayed in the back of her mind, gnawing but none too fiercely. Now, sleepless as she soared over the dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico, the money loomed large. She’d squeezed in a little reading about Costa Rican real estate. She’d googled “investment in Costa Rica” on the web, and found thousands of sites touting everything from boutique hotels to banana farms. The possibilities were there, but the gang seemed to think she’d just stroll out on a beach, point at some cute little resort, and say, “I’ll take that one.” Au contraire: this was a major headache, handling other people’s money. The hundred grand occupied prime terrain in her brain, and in her big black suitcase, currently in flight somewhere between Florida and Tierra del Fuego. It was front page, bottom line, top of the marquee: MONEY. Why did money always do that to her, to them all? Take the front row seat and not go away, even for a minute?

  Her eyes shot open. Ogling surfers and birdwatchers had to be better than this self-flagellating anxiety routine. She dared a glance at her seat-mate, a 22-year old Florida boy on a wave-hunting mission. Incarnating to perfection the post-millennial surfer look, he displayed the scruffy beginnings of a beard, dark wraparound sunglasses, a matty mop of singed-looking blond hair crawling out from under a black wool watch cap, high-topped black tennies, red socks, black shorts, a black t-shirt with several artfully-sited holes, and white earbuds. Though his foot tapped in time with the music, he was fast asleep with the I-Pod rock n’ roll volume turned up so loud her seat vibrated along with the bass line.

  She wondered where he was headed. Probably Tamarindo, with its Euro-California party vibe and access to Playa Grande, Roca Bruja, Playa Negra, and the other northern Nicoya Peninsula surf spots. Lucy intended to spend at least a week on that northwestern coast herself, in an effort to improve her surfing before she got too creaky.

  Between guidebook writing, whitewater rafting, volcano climbing, and windsurfing on Lake Arenal: they said in one guidebook that you could watch the volcano erupt at one end of the late while sailing thirty knot wind at the other end. Now that sounded interesting.

  Lucy opened her carry-on backpack and fished out the four guidebooks to Costa Rica she’d been studying, along with her own, and began page-skimming again, looking for inconsistencies—in room counts, phone numbers, prices, addresses, whatever—from one book to the next. When she found one she made a note in her copy of Grunwald. Along with everything else those inconsistencies would have to be eliminated, and even though this kind of writing qualified as little more than grunt work, she wanted to do it right. She got out her notebook and contemplated her itinerary, trying to squeeze in a little more free time. After a moment she put down the notebook and opened one of her guidebooks to a chapter called Investing in Costa Rica. Within five minutes the book dropped shut in her lap as she fell fast asleep, her seat vibrating gently from the bass line still throbbing out of her neighbor’s earbuds.

  Lucy woke to the sound of a male flight attendant speaking Spanish softly, then switching to English. She pushed up the shade on her window to let the early light in. The flight attendant announced their imminent arrival at Juan Santamaria International Airport in San Jose, and gave instructions on what to do when they landed. The light streamed through a heap of golden pink clouds blanketing mediu
m-sized mountains to the east. As the plane banked west to make an approach, Lucy could see ahead, where San Jose and its suburbs and neighboring towns sprawled across a green valley and climbed the surrounding hills.

  The plane touched ground, bounced into its slow-down groove, and soon taxied to the terminal, a long, pale, two-story building on the east side of the airport. Within minutes they had deplaned into air that washed like balm over the skin. San Jose was said to have a nearly perfect climate; Lucy could feel it. They cross the tarmac and entered the terminal building to check in and wait for their luggage.

  Ten minutes later, after a jolt of anxiety—where was that stinking money-stuffed suitcase?!—Lucy spotted it, wedged between a couple of silver surfboard bags. Her seatmate from the plane grabbed one, gave her a look, and said, “See you at the beach?” with a vaguely sexual smirk.

  She gazed back at him, putting on an inscrutable face. With recently cut short blonde hair, she was tall and thin and pretty in an athletic sort of way, in nearly perfect shape and well-preserved at 34. But, at 34, even if she didn’t quite look it, she had ten years on him. She said, “Tamarindo?” with just the slightest hint of flirtation in her tone, and he nodded with a grin, then went off to join his surf pals. Lucy shook off the brief encounter and grabbed her bag.

  Weary but buzzing with arrival energy, the troop of travelers lined up to fill out the usual paperwork. Reading over the customs form, Lucy realized that a moment of truth loomed: among other things the form asked how much money you were bringing into the country. This was where she felt compelled to lie, and in doing so enter the land of illegality. There would be no turning back.