Snapshot (The Carlotta Carlyle Mysteries)

by Linda Barnes

  Over the weekend I wondered about Mooney’s dreams.

  Monday morning, at headquarters, I thought I might actually be offered a congratulatory handshake, a collegial pat on the back. Mooney hadn’t died. Emily Woodrow hadn’t died. The poison plant at 632 Longwood had been shut down. A receptionist at David Menander’s hotel had picked Renzel out of a lineup as the “flower delivery man.”

  “Mooney? In a meeting,” I was told when I arrived. I waited long enough to drink one cup of coffee. Long enough to hunt for doughnuts, tracking their cinnamon smell to an empty box in the trash.

  Through a slit in the shade on Mooney’s door, I could see that he was entertaining two suits. They didn’t look like plainclothes cops. They looked like politicians or businessmen. Possibly lawyers. Maybe I ought to take a hike, call, and reschedule.

  “Hey, thank goodness,” JoAnn Triola said when she caught sight of me.

  I glanced behind me. We went to the police academy together and we get along okay, but Jo doesn’t usually offer up prayers of thanksgiving on making visual contact.

  “What?” I said cautiously.

  “You’d better go right in.”

  “Why?”

  “Mooney’s been asking for you every five minutes,” she said.

  “Maybe I’ll leave,” I said.

  She took two long strides across the floor and rapped on his glass before I could stop her. He glanced up, startled, saw me and pushed back his chair.

  The door opened.

  “Carlotta, get in here.”

  “I hope you’re feeling better,” I said sweetly.

  One of the men in the office popped out of his chair like a jack-in-the-box. He was wearing a pinstriped navy suit. A crisp white handkerchief peeped from his breast pocket. On his lap, he cradled a small round hat with a flipped-up brim. The other man rose more slowly. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, a brown suit.

  If I’d known it was going to be formal, I’d have worn a suit, too.

  “Sit down,” Mooney ordered firmly, nodding me into a chair. “This is Mr. Kuh—”

  “Kurundi, madame.” The man who’d popped had a clipped, almost British accent, dark skin.

  Mooney said, “Mr. Kurundi is a representative of the World Health Organization, and this is Mr. Wiley from the FDA.”

  “Food and Drug Administration,” I said warily. “Hi. Carlotta Carlyle. Let me guess. You got a letter from a woman named Tina Sukhia.”

  Wiley said, “We should have been contacted immediately.”

  I shrugged, gestured at Mooney, said, “He was in the hospital. I was busy sitting on a killer.”

  Mr. Kurundi spoke in a high voice with a melodic lilt. “You read a letter which was intended for the World Health Organization.”

  “It hadn’t been sent,” I said. “I didn’t exactly tamper with the mail.”

  His tone became more severe. “Nevertheless, once you read such a letter, we should have been informed with utmost speed.”

  “In Switzerland? What’s going on here?” I asked.

  “Exactly this,” Wiley, the Food and Drug man said. “If the proper authorities had been activated at the proper time, we would now know the names of Renzel’s suppliers, wholesalers, middle men, exporters. The whole bag.”

  “And Emily Woodrow would be dead,” I pointed out. “Unless she was getting ready to stand trial for multiple murder. Sounds to me like your beef’s with this Kurundi guy. Ask him what the hell he’s been doing with the letter Tina Sukhia sent him months ago.”

  “Excuse me, madame,” Kurundi said, fiddling with his hat, “but you did not read that letter. It was, shall I say, both a vague and confusing communication. Also, the World Health Organization is a large tree with many branches. Prompt action was indeed taken once Miss Sukhia’s letter reached its correct destination. However, we began our investigation from the other end, you might say. We were grateful to Miss Sukhia for pointing us toward Cephamycin. We discovered it was, as she implied, arriving into several third-world countries in a contaminated form—”

  “I’m sure she appreciates your gratitude,” I said. Mooney fired me a warning glance.

  “In conjunction with the Food and Drug Administration of your country, we were working with the Cephagen Company’s president—”

  “Menander? The guy who got shot?”

  “Yes,” Wiley admitted.

  “I’m sure he appreciates your work as well,” I said.

  Mooney said, “Menander had noticed that his orders from JHHI had picked up considerably.”

  “So Renzel would have access to more packaging materials,” I said. “While Muir and JHHI paid the bill.”

  “Renzel could counterfeit the drug at minimal cost,” Mooney added, “but he couldn’t counterfeit the holograms. When the World Health Organization started questioning Menander about unusual ordering practices—”

  Kurundi interrupted. “Which we did because the packaging was so perfect, everything absolutely correct. We assumed the counterfeit drug must have been coming directly from the Orlando manufacturing plant.”

  “Menander must have realized that JHHI’s orders had more than doubled,” Mooney continued. “But he couldn’t believe Helping Hand would have any truck with counterfeiters. He came up here, figuring Muir must have a good explanation.”

  “And Renzel got to him first,” I said. “Renzel had a hell of a nerve. And Muir—I can’t believe he didn’t figure it out. Five deaths in one day.”

  Mooney said, “He didn’t want to figure it out, Carlotta. He knew he had a problem; we’ve got that in his own writing, notes and letters left in his desk. He was trying to hold off a scandal until a bequest came through. He was expecting a twenty-million-dollar legacy—”

  “Why didn’t he hide the medical records?” I asked Mooney.

  “He did.”

  “No,” I said. “Donovan got them.”

  “He hid them in plain sight,” Mooney said. “Shunted them into general records instead of bringing them up for review. He planned to recall them, after the bequest—”

  Mr. Kurundi interrupted again. “Madame, you perhaps do not take this seriously enough. Counterfeiting of drugs is a major problem worldwide. In Africa, in Nigeria, more than a quarter of the medicines on the market are not what they seem to be. Millions and billions of dollars are involved. In Burma, men, women, and children believe they are taking good medicine to counter the effects of malaria, and they die from it. Hundreds of them die.”

  Wiley broke in. “And now, what do we have? A minor operation closed, a tiny dent in an enormous machine. We could have placed operatives inside this plant. We could have traced shipments and made arrests up and down the chain of command.”

  “You’ve got Renzel,” I said.

  “He’s not talking.”

  “Make a deal with him. Isn’t that what you guys do? Offer him a cushy cell in a country club jail.”

  “Maybe I should have said that he’s talking,” Wiley admitted slowly, “but he doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “A team of psychiatrists could have a field day on that guy,” Mooney offered.

  “He tried to save the kids,” I said, “the children at JHHI. He seemed genuinely grieved by their deaths.”

  Wiley said, “Self-interest. You don’t shit in your own backyard.”

  Kurundi looked so shocked at the FDA man’s language that Wiley colored and apologized. To me.

  “Renzel’s reaction seemed like more than self-interest to me,” I said. “He had some kind of moral code. Them and us. Black and white. The code got so twisted, it probably snapped.”

  “Him along with it,” Mooney muttered.

  Kurundi ran his fingers around his hat brim. “It seems,” he said bitterly, “that the Sukhia woman was correct. I read your newspapers: An airplane crashes; no Americans are aboard, so all is well. You dump cigarettes on foreign markets. You dump waste products, some of them toxic, on any country so poor and debt-ridden they cannot refuse. You mov
e slowly, cautiously, in this case, even though the suspect lab itself is located here—”

  “Now wait a darn minute,” the Food and Drug man said. “Most of the labs aren’t here. This stuff mainly goes on in Turkey and Greece—”

  Maybe I could get the two of them going and slink out the door. I stood, and they immediately ceased arguing.

  “Mooney,” I said, “why am I here?”

  “These gentlemen are gonna try to suspend your PI license, Carlotta. Yank your ticket. They’re gonna do their best.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  “Believe it.”

  “I had to move in a hurry, Mooney. You know that. Emily Woodrow would be dead if I hadn’t—”

  “Madame, you say it yourself,” Kurundi observed. “You saved one life. We could have saved thousands of lives.”

  I counted to ten, counted to ten again. “Excuse me,” I said. “What exactly would you have found out, in this perfect situation, if I hadn’t acted so hastily?”

  “We’ve told you.”

  “Repeat it, please.”

  “Renzel’s suppliers.”

  “He used water. Arrest the water company. He probably used red food dye. Arrest whoever the hell makes food coloring for birthday cake frosting.”

  “Suppliers of machinery,” Kurundi went on, “pharmaceutical bottling machinery. And especially, we would like to net the wholesaler, probably someone this man Renzel met at one of his international conferences. The wholesaler would then sell to a brokerage house. It’s a vast network, a chain. You break it at one place, it starts up again. It’s a huge industry, this counterfeiting, as bad, even more dangerous, than illegal drugs.”

  Illegal drugs. I could almost hear the puzzle pieces click in my mind. Illegal drugs.

  “Carlotta?” Mooney said. “You okay?”

  “I’m not the one got shot full of dope, Mooney.”

  “You looked funny for a minute.”

  “Mr. Kurundi,” I said. “Mr. Wiley. If you were to get a lead to the next link in this chain, the wholesaler, would you consider ignoring the matter of my license? You probably have more important things to do than pick on me.”

  “What do you know, Carlotta?” Mooney said too quietly.

  “Absolutely nothing, Mooney. Pleased to make your acquaintances, gentlemen.”

  “Carlotta—” Mooney said.

  “Arrest me, or I’m gone,” I said on my way out the door. Under my breath, I added, “I hope you have Technicolor nightmares, Moon.” He didn’t hear me, or if he did, he ignored it.

  44

  “Professional pride, Patsy,” I said insistently, “don’t you have any?”

  “Carlotta, look, I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you with the woman’s job history—”

  “It’s water under the bridge. But I want a little satisfaction here.”

  “Sounds like you want a freebie.”

  “This is right up your alley and I’m gonna sit on your phone till I get it, Patsy. Miami lawyer named Vandenburg. Thurman W. Vandenburg. I want to know if he’s a defense attorney, and I want to know if he defends drug runners—”

  “He’s earning a living in Miami? Of course he does.”

  “In particular, a guy named Jaime Valdez Corroyo. I want to know if Valdez Corroyo’s ever been arrested, if Vandenburg ever got him off. I want to know if Valdez Corroyo was tried alone or with anybody else.”

  “When can I—”

  “Start punching names right now, Patsy. Time-and-a-half rates.”

  “Double?”

  “No way.”

  I could hear her fingernails tapping the keys. I spelled Vandenburg and Valdez Corroyo, and within eight minutes she hit gold.

  “Bingo,” I said. “Send me the bill.”

  “Will do.”

  “While it’s on your screen, read me Vandenburg’s phone number, okay?”

  The lawyer’s secretary took my “absolutely urgent” at face value. Thurman W. Vandenburg returned my call within six minutes.

  “Get in touch with C.R.G.,” I said, after giving my name and phone number. “Or I could call him Carlos. Have him call me. I’ll be sitting by this phone for the next four hours—and if I don’t hear from him, tell him I doubt he’ll ever see his daughter.”

  That was bullshit, but I wanted a call fast.

  “I don’t understand you, miss.”

  “You don’t have to understand. What you do have is a number to call on the ‘Jaime Valdez Corroyo’ business. Not Valdez Corroyo’s real number. No point in phoning the state pen, huh? Do yourself a favor and call Carlos.”

  Vandenburg said nothing.

  “Time is passing,” I warned.

  “I may have, uh, some little difficulty reaching this man you speak of,” the lawyer said.

  “That’s life,” I said.

  I fidgeted around for a while, trying to organize my files. Gave that up, brought my National steel guitar downstairs, and started picking out old fiddle tunes, playing faster and faster until the fingerwork required total concentration. Usually music can fill my mind, empty it of everything but melody and harmony, bass line and chords.

  I jumped when the phone rang half an hour later. Vandenburg again.

  “The man we spoke of earlier cannot call you on your own line.”

  “Can he call me on somebody else’s line?”

  “I am not trying to amuse you. Is there a pay phone near your house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Somewhere quiet?”

  That would rule out any phone in Harvard Square. There was a booth in the back of a drugstore on Huron Avenue. “Yes.”

  “Go there now, call collect, and give me the number.”

  “Okay.”

  “I warn you. I’ll check to see that it really is a pay phone.”

  “Hey, I’m not trying to set the guy up.”

  “Our friend is a cautious man.”

  “No kidding.”

  “He has business enemies.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  We did the whole song and dance. I was relieved he didn’t make me change pay phones until he found one he liked. At the drugstore, I bought a copy of the Globe, read a lengthy article about restructuring at the top at JHHI, and waited. Twenty, thirty, forty-five minutes went by. I studied the Op/Ed page, the funnies, Ann Landers, “Ask Beth.” She advised a self-described “mature” ten-year-old to avoid attending sex parties with her best friend’s father.

  The phone rang. I grabbed the receiver, heard a hollow sound, a faint hum, a click.

  “Señora?”

  “Señorita, and I’d rather speak English.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Who am I speaking to?”

  “The man you wish to speak to. We will avoid names, I think.”

  “Are you her father? Paol—my sister’s father?”

  “Let us say this: A woman you know well made a trip to my country last year, to beg an old man for money. She was accompanied by her daughter. Soon afterward the old man, my father, died. My father and I, we were not reconciled at the time of his death, you understand, but the housekeeper, an old and faithful friend, spoke to me of this visit.”

  “And you hired somebody to kidnap her, just in case she turned out to be your daughter? To check her out?”

  “What is this?”

  “What do you call it?”

  “We speak at odds, señorita. I no longer understand you.” There was an echo after every phrase. Pauses made the conversation awkward. The man’s voice was deep and smooth, heavily accented. It had both warmth and power. A caressing voice.

  “The girl was encouraged to take a plane ride,” I said.

  He sounded puzzled. “Not on my orders,” he said.

  The trip could have been Paolina’s idea. But Paco Sanchez had loaned her money, encouraged her, obtained a false passport for her, planned to accompany her.

  “If you’re telling the truth, you may have a problem, señor,” I sa
id. “In the future.”

  “I may have many problems in the future,” he said evenly.

  “In all innocence, your—my sister may have confided a secret to a man who would take advantage of it,” I said slowly. Paco Sanchez had asked Paolina leading questions about herself. Most likely he’d learned of the connection to Roldán Gonzales. Figured a rich father would be willing to pay for his daughter’s safety. Figured the chance to get in good with a big-time drug dealer would be worth the price of plane fare.

  I went on. “If you should come in contact with a man named Paco Sanchez, a man who says he knows your daughter, and could arrange to bring your daughter to you—”

  “It would not be advisable for her to visit,” Roldán said. “I will speak to my attorney about this matter.”

  “Will you deal with Sanchez?”

  “As it is necessary,” he said in a tone that almost made me shiver. “Is that all?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “May I ask, why the need to find out about her? After all these years?”

  There was a long pause and I wondered if the connection had been broken. The deep voice, when it spoke again, seemed uncertain. “I don’t know. How do you say it? A whim of mine, perhaps. Maybe old age approaches. A child—she is part of me. My friend, the old housekeeper, said she looks very much like me.”

  “Then you must be a handsome man,” I said. “Your daughter—my sister—this girl—is lovely.”

  He chuckled. It amazed me, this monster I’d read about, this killer. He chuckled.

  “I know about you, señorita,” he said.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “Many things I like. Some I dislike.”

  “Such as?”

  “You are a divorced woman, and you sleep with a man whose father is not in a good line of work.”

  “Yeah. That’s good, coming from you!”

  “You don’t know me,” he said somberly.

  “Oh, yeah, but you know me, right? You think you found out anything about me by hiring a thug too dumb to steal my trash without getting caught? Mister, if it’s true that you know somebody by the caliber of people they hire, I’m wasting my time here, you’re too dumb to help me.”