Clint Faraday Mysteries collection A Muddled Murders Collector's Edition

by Moulton, CD

  Something occurred to him then. There really was a “Why?” to that scenario! He thought he knew what it must be.

  “‘Why’ is because the suicide note was thrown away with the carton.”

  Maribel screeched. Clint said he would be glad to read her a bit of the note. He took out the sheet with the six lines and read: “I cannot longer tolerate this situation in my life. Life has become empty and without meaning. I have decided to take a final step to end the travesty my existence represents. I know this solution will deeply affect my wife and children. For this I apologize. I always have held you as first concern, though often I understand it did not seem thus.”

  He paused then. Maribel was shaking her head and crossing herself.

  “Must I go on?”

  “No!” Bonita cried. “Enough! Emilio is correct! It is not a disgrace when it is someone else who does a thing. It is a disgrace if you do it or know of it and do not act to stop it! I know Carlo well. I know he would stop before he actually ... did it. He went too far. I know he has started to do this before and could not. God will forgive because I know he was a good man in his heart. It is my own daughter who has brought this on us in her greed and desire to be of a station she is NOT!

  “I will speak with the priest. I can swear that Carlo did not do this intentionally, that he would have not done it. That he repented in the moment before he died. He will understand and will accept that Carlo was forgiven.

  “Carlo will be buried in consecrated ground. This I promise. I knew him.”

  “Must it be known that he died of his own hand?” Margarita asked.

  “No. Dr. Astrades will put on the certificate that he died of acute cyanide poisoning, possibly by accident,” Sergio promised.

  “Thank you,” Maribel said quietly. For once she wasn’t on a tirade. Clint wasn’t fooled for one second by the extreme change. She was simply terrified she would be charged with obstruction and evidence-tampering.

  Was she in that room when he took the stuff? Was that why she tried to get rid of the note? DID Carlo change his mind? Did SHE then dose his juice?

  For that matter, did she write the note and set the whole thing up to murder him? After all, she hated this place and wanted to move back to Panamá City. Now she would inherit and could do that.

  He was going to look into this a little more. He didn’t really believe that, but it was far too much of a possibility.

  He had Sergio call the officer/guard at the house and have him gather the juice cartons from the garbage bin. He called back five minutes later and said there was a page stuffed into one of them, not the one on top.

  “Who signed it?” Clint asked.

  “There isn’t any signature, just ‘Carlo Vasquez V.’ typed on the bottom.”

  Oh? An unsigned suicide note? Now Clint WAS curious!

  “I’ve arranged for us to be at the reading of the will,” Sergio informed Clint. “The lawyer, Gabriel Gabriel, says there are a few things that will cause some trouble. Emilio asked that he contact me and arranged for the lawyer to come here to read the will. This afternoon.”

  “I’ll be there,” Clint promised.

  “We must first fully understand that the rights of inheritance here in Panamá are not the same as in the United States – for the information of the people who may not know that. If they wish to contest, it will prove fruitless.”

  Clint raised an eyebrow toward Sergio, who whispered that the wife could claim everything if there was no will, but could be left nothing if there was. Clint knew that. It wasn’t too much different in the states.

  Gabriel continued. “The will is unusual. It leaves everything to one person. That person is not the wife. That is what is most unusual.

  “I will read the will. It is simple.”

  When he said it was not the wife Maribel actually screamed. He gave her a withering look.

  “I, Carlo Vasquez Vega, do hereby stipulate the following as my personal registered last will and testament.

  “I will tender statement simple as to why this document is in the form and manner you find it.

  “For twelve years I had an idyllic married life. I was a working attorney with a good practice and was able to provide my family with those things a father wishes most to tender to those he loves most in the world.

  “Then I entered into the dirty world of politics, working for a representative who is related to my wife. We were able to make deals that shame me, in retrospect. We became extremely wealthy, but had no self-pride. This affected my wife in a very negative way. She became a grasping greedy person who placed material wealth above all things in life. She as much as turned her back on myself and our family.

  “Her mother was living with us since her father died and tried to warn me that Maribel was fast becoming too much the same as her uncle, the representative.

  “My son, Emilio, was never as badly affected as was my daughter, Margarita. Margarita was, if slowly, becoming more and more the same as her mother. The love and caring left the marriage. We stayed married, a huge mistake, for the sake of the children, though I knew by then that it was only for her. She liked the money and being someone who knew everyone of station. She has never realized that she did not acquire station, she merely knew many who have station.

  “Station is a very empty, hollow thing. It has taken the meaning of life from me.

  “I leave everything I die possessed of to my son, Emilio Vasquez S. It is solely to his discretion to decide what to do with the monies and properties. I ask only that he see that Bonita Sevilla is cared for so long as she lives and that he try to teach Margarita that money and station are meaningless empty things that will make one’s life as meaningless and empty. There is a recent listing of all properties and holdings attached to be declared the properties and holdings of Emilio.

  “Are there any questions?”

  Maribel snarled a curse. Margarita was staring in shock. Bonita looked relieved. Emilio was as much as disbelieving.

  Maybe Maribel killed her husband. She would lose her “station” and wealth except for what Emilio decided to give her. Margarita might actually learn a lesson. Bonita had always tried to help Carlo. Emilio would be generous to the deserving people. If she killed her husband she could get six years in prison here. This was a life sentence.

  All-in-all a pretty good ending!

  Oye!

  Mario Guerra paddled his cayuca around the tip of the mangrove island and toward the Rio Oeste. The water was shallow, but the tide was high. He wouldn’t go directly into the river. It was raining in the mountains, making the run-out very muddy. There wouldn’t be much to find and the logs and detritus would make progress difficult.

  He went on southeastward toward Isla Pastore, following the flow of the river, searching along the banks of the mainland and islands for things washing out. He found a life vest, nearly new, a good paddle, a plastic fishing bucket, a tackle box with a lot of expensive lures ... someone had capsized between the river and Isla Pastore. They lost all their equipment. There would be a big reward.

  He went around past the end of Sheppard’s Island to see the keel of a fiberglass boat sticking out of the water, moving along with the slow flow. He went to the boat and looked it over. A sixteen footer with the foot of a forty five horse Yamaha four-stroke engine sticking up. That meant someone was hurt. He hoped they made it to shore safely.

  He slipped into the water and under the boat to see a woman’s body caught in the steering wheel. She was about twenty five or thirty, slim and attractive, long blond hair.

  He swam back out and called “Oye!” loudly in the Indio attention form: OIEE-uh!

  After three calls he received an answering call from the river. He told them to call the police. There had been an accident.

  “How was your morning?” Sergio (Valdez, Cpt. of the violent crimes division of the Bocas del Toro police) asked of Judi Lum and Clint Faraday.

  “Fair. We went to Bastimentos and snorkeled around those c
oral heads at the tip, then had a good picnic lunch on Red Frog,” Judi answered. “They don’t like for us to come in a boat, but that’s just too tough!”

  The phone buzzed. Sergio answered, wrote down some information and hung up.

  “Boat accident. That was Ronaldo from Almirante. He said for me to come out because it’s in my jurisdiction more than his.”

  “An accident? Why call you?” Judi asked.

  “Because there was a death. A woman,” Sergio answered. “She was in the boat that turned over.”

  “Still, an accident?” Clint wondered.

  “She was tied to the wheel inside with duct tape. That sort of takes the ‘accident’ part into the ‘Yeah, right!’ category.”

  “I guess!” Judi agreed.

  “Want to come along?” Sergio asked.

  “Clint will go. I’ve got to host the garden club in about an hour and a half, See ya!” Judi replied.

  “Lead on, Jeeves!” Clint said.

  “We don’t have an ID on the victim yet,” Sergio reported. “The boat was apparently stolen last night from a gringo who has a place on Tierra Oscura. Willie Macon. I gave Mario twenty dollars for the things he found. That’s about what the reward would be. He went on ahead in the flow a little bit and back along the mangroves to find stuff tangled in the roots or whatever. He found the first things right at the mouth of Rio Oeste.”

  “Yeah. I told him to try to find where the boat turned over,” Clint added. They were reporting to Dr. Astrades, the ME. “He’ll find it. The Indios have an uncanny ability to find things in the water.”

  “How will he find it?” Doc asked.

  “Things that sink right there,” Sergio said. “Rods and reels, stuff like that.”

  “Oh? Do you know there WERE any rods and reels?”

  “There was a tackle box, so it’s a good bet,” Clint said. “There’ll be other things.”

  Doc nodded and said that his assistant was doing a rape kit on her. She had been bruised a bit so that might be another good bet. Sergio and Clint agreed. Clint said they might find DNA – except, what would they do with it?

  “If we find it we can chart it,” Sergio pointed out. “There might be something on file.”

  “You have files of ... oh, yeah. When I got the pistol permit they took DNA samples,” Clint replied. “I suppose they’ll have other samples.”

  “I think that soon there will be a DNA sample for everyone when they get a cedula,” Doc said. “That’s almost everybody in Panamá. There’s some talk of required DNA samples worldwide for passports.”

  “That’ll be one from the states. Big brother is watching you! On the other hand, it’ll certainly make a lot of crime detection a hell of a lot easier.”

  The medical computer attention signal dinged. Dr. Astrades went to study the screen. He said her fingerprints identified her as Serena Windham from Shreveport, Louisiana. She was in Panamá now on a tourist visa with a full residencia in progress. She had arrived eighty six days ago and had her temporary visa renewal set up for getting the residency transfer papers two days ago in Changuinola. The ninety day visa would expire January two.

  “THAT might be a very important bit of data!” Clint said.

  “Really? Why?” Doc asked.

  “Where did she get her first card?”

  “Panamá City,” Doc answered, reading it off the screen.

  “And she applied for the renewal...?”

  “Yes. Changuinola. I think I ... see what you mean,” Sergio said. “Someone didn’t know where she was until she applied for the renewal stamp could, as you say, be important.”

  “Or not. We have to find out. What else do we know? Where was she staying?”

  “That, we don’t know. Yet,” Sergio replied. “I can have ... it’s on the renewal form. Punta Robalo.”

  “So I go to Punta Robalo.”

  Punta Robalo is a picturesque little peninsula into the Caribbean just northwest of Chiriqui Grande. It consists of a few houses and a tienda or two along with the regular businesses in such places. It’s in an area where there’s some petty crime, but is generally quiet. Clint knew some people there so was able to find that she had been staying in a private house there and paying room and board. She had given the name of Janice Wells to people. No one would check her ID there.

  An alias in a small out-of-the-way village. She was hiding from someone for some reason.

  “I want to check on anyone from Louisiana who came to Panamá in the past three months and have not left, where they are now, where they’ve been while here,” Sergio said into the com-radio set at the station. “I know that’s a large order, but there’s been a murder.”

  “We can use the computer for use of visas in a few seconds. I’ll fax a list,” came back. “As to where they’ve been ... unless they were ... I can check reservations on the airlines and the through buses.”

  “Thanks,” Sergio said. “Well, Clint. We’ll have what they have in a few minutes. We can go over the reports, but there’s not much. We have a bit of blood of a type that’s not hers. Doc is running a DNA chart on it. We can check our own data base and send for Louisiana to do the same. There was a baseball cap in the stuff Mario found with a few hairs caught in the adjustment band. It’s a reddish brown, so isn’t a Panamanian.

  “Her hair is bleached. It was what Doc called more a tannish sandy color – whatever that means. Maybe a light dirty blond?” Clint nodded. “She had recent sexual activity, but it is indeterminant that it was rape or by any strong forcible means. It could be kinky rough sex, but not too rough. DNA was recovered.

  “She had a baby at some time. Doc estimates one to two years ago. Not by caesarian, so normal birth at term. She had some dental work and had suffered some abuse that liking rough sex might indicate, but it was on the top end of that. The dental work was probably because she had a couple of teeth knocked out. All of it within the past three to three and a half years. Her clothes and those found where she had been staying were bought here in Panamá. David and Changuinola. The only luggage she checked in on the flight here was a small suitcase carried on as hand luggage and a cosmetics case. She had perhaps two thousand dollars in cash, but could have used an ATM with her Visa card. It was from New Orleans Federal. Debit/credit card. She didn’t have much jewelry. A gold watch and a small diamond ring. Cheap earrings.

  “Louisiana is sending us everything they have on her. It should be here in a couple of hours.

  “That’s it for the moment.”

  “I can guess a little from this,” Clint said. “That she was running from an abusive boyfriend is pretty certain. ‘Why’ is the question, but it might have to do with the baby. We have to know where it is and why it’s not here with her. We find him, we find her killer. He’s right here. It shouldn’t be too difficult.

  “We might have a hard time getting anything solid if he’s staying somewhere else and wasn’t seen in Bocas. If he’s anywhere in the province we can tie his ass to a lamppost.”

  “If he’s in Panamá we can tie his ass to a lamppost,” Sergio said. “This isn’t the states and he can’t get away on the silly technicalities here. If he’s here she was running from him, she’s dead by murder, he gets the maximum. At the moment he’s guilty if he’s here. Period. Here, you’re guilty until proven innocent. The victim has some rights here like they do NOT in the states.”

  Clint couldn’t argue with that point! He’d seen too many times how the system worked and it worked very well in most cases. In the states they would catch him, he’d show she’d been seeing another man because he once caught her talking to him in a bar, would be smeared as a cheap whore who ran around every chance she got and it would be claimed he killed her in a fit of passion and it was all HER fault because she drove him to it! He’d get away with a minimum sentence. Here, he could prove she was a prostitute, the state would make him state how he met her – which they would show was after she was in a business which isn’t illegal here and would thr
ow it out as irrelevant. He wasn’t driven into anything if he knew about it all along. Next witness. He’d get the max.

  Sergio’s point about tagging him if he was anywhere in Panamá would be based on the fact that no one else here would want her dead. She didn’t know anyone here long enough to incite that kind of hatred. No one would kill her because he was rejected. You couldn’t find anyone who hadn’t been rejected any number of times. That was what sex was like. If this one turns you down you look elsewhere. Maybe you resent it a bit so you won’t ever buy the bitch another drink! You go to the next one and say,“Hi, honey! Want some company? My girlfriend just dumped me and I certainly need some company.” It’s a good line for starting a conversation.

  Weird line of thought, but true.

  The fax dinged and a list of thirty nine people from Louisiana came on. Clint looked it over and noted that most were traveling with family so would automatically be put on the back burner. He wouldn’t eliminate them altogether because there would always be a possibility that was what it was about.

  That left him with: Leonard Bellows, 47, single, with ACRD Enterprises as a real estate agent and consultant.

  William Frances, 31, single, CPA, tourist.

  Arlen LeGrande, 27, divorced, investment search.

  Richard Travers, 29, single, (?) tourist.

  Edouard Withers, 33, married, machinist, tourist.

  Marcus Greco, 44, single, musician, tourist

  John Johns, 63, widower, retired, tourist.

  Clint decided it was probably Frances, Travers or Greco. That made it much simpler!

  Yeah! Right!

  The families were the George Killians, the Henry Fallows, the William Berts, the Yancy Bottoms the Joseph Ben Bills and the Samuel T. Youngs. They could either be checked later or become unnecessary sooner, depending on which of the first list did it. He would wait for the other information – the hair in the cap was female. Color and texture matched Mary Macon, who said it was her fishing cap.