“Douglas Albright?” I couldn’t believe my ears. Douglas and I had been friends since college.
“That’s it. Douglas Albright. He’s the manager of that restaurant where I sometimes take a meal. The Creamery, isn’t it? I’ve seen him around town. Born to be a Sheila. Remembered he was a friend of yours, too.”
I let his comments about Douglas pass. “What can you tell me about the gallery owner?”
“There are two of them. The one I’ve seen is a grey-haired bloke, a little younger than me, but I can’t remember his name, luv. Even if I could, I can’t pronounce it. It isn’t American.”
“Said the Aussie,” I replied without thinking.
He laughed. “I may be a True Blue, but I’m one hundred percent American.” I could feel his mood shifting over the phone. “I’ll tell you, though, those Mexicalis, they’ve got a good thing going. I wish I could sell half the volume the pre-Columbian stuff does. Not that I’m hurting.” His voice carried a false brilliance, so I let it lay.
“Race, what’s your overall impression of the place?”
“You want me to bag on them?”
“If that means I want you to give me an honest assessment, then yes.”
“Well, they’ve been going great bangers since they opened their doors. As far as I can tell, they haven’t had the year or two slump that usually happens before a business gets established, especially in this financial crisis. Course, they’re working all hours. When I drive by there ten-thirty, eleven o’clock at night, sometimes they’re still open. They pay their membership dues on time, contribute to the widows and orphans fund, keep the sidewalks swept, so I can’t place it.”
“Place what?”
“The feeling that I have they’re too good to be true.”
We hung up after I promised to give Mom his love, which I had no intention of doing. Not unless I wanted to hear a sixty-minute diatribe on her dislike of him.
On the off chance Mesoamerican Galleries was suffering financially more than they let on, I made a quick call to Richard’s department, asking for a copy of Meso’s tax returns. Richard was out of town at a conference, but I knew someone would get back to me if I left a message and instructions.
That done, I drove home and put sliced cucumbers on my eyes just as Mom suggested. I’d fished them out of a Greek salad one of the bridesmaids had brought for the occasion. The salad had hardly been touched, since next to Tio’s culinary offerings, it didn’t stand much of a chance. Finishing off the rest of the wilted mess as an early dinner, I fell asleep on the couch with the Tugs nestled in my arms. True, I should have been cleaning up the apartment after the afternoon’s festivities instead of napping, but fat chance. Should this ever get back to my mother, I’ll say it was totally Tugger’s idea.
The old duffer—Mr. Talbot’s expression, not mine—woke me around six-thirty p.m. my time or nine-thirty p.m.
Boston time, which is where he was. Through a sleepy haze, I could hear the background sounds of music, clinking china, and happy, chattering people. That made me even more depressed. Saturday night and a man in his eighties is out on the town, and I’m at home with my cat. The thought sent me straight for a Milky Way bar I’d found under the sofa the day before.
I gnawed on it while I briefed Talbot on Carlos’ situation. He, in turn, either muttered, “What a shame, just a shame,” or made tsk-tsking noises.
When I’d finished, he shouted through the phone, “I remember that nice young man and his mother from some of your holiday office parties. Just a moment, my dear,” he added.
He covered the mouthpiece and said to someone, probably a waiter, “Yes, that’s my lobster, not the crab, and my baked potato, as well.” Lobster and baked potato, I thought. My, oh my.
“I have to go soon, Liana,” he said, piercing the airwaves. I held the phone as far away from me as I could. “My dinner has arrived, and I do have guests. I just wanted to get back to you as soon as the phone service reached me with your messages. I’ll make the necessary calls and see what I can set up for late afternoon upon my return tomorrow. If he wants to retain my services…”
“Oh, he does, he does,” I interrupted, feeling I could speak for Carlos.
“Well, I’ll call him from here in the morning to confirm things. He’s being held down in San Jose until his arraignment, correct?
“Yes,” I replied. “Do you need the number?”
“No, I have it,” he said, clearing his throat. Shouting at the top of your voice can be a strain.
“Could I see him tomorrow, as well?” I asked. “I’d like to ask him a few questions.”
“I think it would be better, Lee dear, if you met with him after the arraignment on Monday. I would prefer that no one meet with him until he and I have a chance to go over things. I’ll tell him as much in the morning.”
It was easy to see why James Talbot the Third was such a success. Here was a man who dotted all his “i”s and crossed all his “t”s. Sort of like a good PI. Add to it that he was one of the few people in the world who could intimidate Lila Hamilton Alvarez, considered a Komodo dragon by many. It was a winning combination.
“Would you care to join us Monday afternoon around six?” he asked.
“That would be great,” I replied.
“In that case, I’ll call you tomorrow after I speak with Carlos. Good night, Lee, from Boston Harbor,” he added, hanging up.
I put the phone down and sprinted to the kitchen, putting together my own fish feast, a tuna sandwich with mayo, liberally sprinkled with peanuts and just a hint of wasabi mustard. Not quite the same as lobster, but one must be flexible.
* * * *
Sunday morning I slept in even though I had taken a long nap the night before. I woke up thinking about my long-time friend, Douglas, who I hadn’t seen in a while. I stroked the cat curled up on my chest. Tugger was getting a little heavy for that sort of thing, weighing in at seven pounds, but he was so cute I didn’t want to move him. Laying there caressing his glistening fur and watching his whiskers twitch, it occurred to me I hadn’t spent much time with him recently, quality or otherwise. Realizing I hadn’t done so with my man, either, I sat bolt upright and dialed his number, tossing Tugger onto the bed. John’s voice mail picked up. While soothing a miffed cat, I left a message saying I had the entire
morning free and would love to see him. Then I phoned Douglas’ number and his vm picked up, too. I left a chatty
message about the two of us getting together sooner rather than later, hung up and tried not to think about my Benedict Arnold tendencies.
Instead, I played Bite the Toes Under the Blanket with Tugger for the better part of an hour. Criminy, not having to do anything was fabulous. The phone rang twice close to noon, just as I was having coffee.
The first call came from Mr. Talbot confirming the fact he was now officially handling Carlos’ defense and telling me to meet them at the San Jose Jailhouse at six on Monday. The second call was from Tio.
“Morning, Tio. Qué pasa?”
“Nada, mi sobrina,” he uttered in his soft Spanish. Tío Mateo is my Dad’s only sibling. The fifteen-year difference in their ages and the loss of their parents in a landslide in Vera Cruz made Tío more of a father figure than a brother. He was barely twenty when he walked across Mexico and up to the Central Valley of California bringing along his five-year-old brother, Roberto. Night after night as a child, Tío would tell me in Spanish how he worked his way up to become a distinguished chef at a prestigious restaurant in San Jose. He always ended with his proudest story—and I was proud, too—that of Dad carrying a 3.9 average in high school and being offered a track scholarship to Stanford. Tío keeps my Mexican heritage alive and kicking. I will always love him for that.
“How’s Mira doing?” I asked, guilty about not having rushed over there and comforted my friend in the a.m.
“Mucho major.” Then Tío called her Our Sweet Mira in Spanish, throwing in Angel From Heaven for good measure. Sometimes
I get jealous about how much my family adores Mira. To my credit, it’s not often and it never lasts for long. “She sleeps soundly after eating my Huevos Rancheros,” he said switching to English. Tío still tries to perfect his English, which isn’t bad, though his accent is heavy.
“Tio, can I speak to Mom for a minute?”
“Liana,” she said, coming on the line. “What do you have for me?”
“Well, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is Mr. Talbot just phoned and said he’s going to take the case. He flies back from Boston this afternoon and will see Carlos then. The bad news is I can’t see Carlos until tomorrow afternoon at six. Nobody can.”
“Hmmmmm,” she answered. “I thought you would have had things more under control by now.”
“More under control? It’s the weekend and Carlos is in jail!”
“I understand,” she interrupted, “but you must be persistent.”
“I’m doing my best,” I said, feeling angry and guilty at the same time, “but I’m not sure—”
“Nonsense, Liana,” she said, her voice overriding mine. “Surety is in the mind. I realize the fatigue you must be experiencing in your long hours of dealing with the Fogel Case in addition to the wedding, but one must remain focused.”
The Fogel Case was my current assignment, and it was true, it had me draggin’ my wagon. One of our ex-employees, Leonard Fogel, had asked us to save his duff before his start up Internet search engine and online advertising company, Bingo Bango, went down the tubes. Leonard left D.I. about eight months ago, forming this start up, which had just received its first venture capital round of funding. It was very similar to Google, MSN, Yahoo, Silo Junction and so forth but giving pretty fierce competition to one and all due to Leonard’s particular algorithms.
An algorithm links something to something and enables the user to zip through all the junk on the Internet and get to the junk they really want to see, plus some junk suggested by the program, itself. I hope that’s not too technical.
These algorithms were touted to be innovative and advanced, even for Silicon Valley. I really didn’t get the significance of it, myself, but Richard, my thirty-one year-old brother and the computer genius “from whom all things flow,” got it and thought Leonard was a wizard. High praise coming from someone who has written several articles and managed to be on the cover of Wired magazine for his own technical skills.
The long and the short of it was, Leonard Fogel, a skinny, clean shaven geek of about twenty-four, suspected someone was copying and selling his in-house web encodings shortly after he created them. They kept showing up a day or two later on Silo Junction’s website, a start-up with a reputation for a no-holds-barred attitude. No matter what security measures Leonard put in place, it still came down to the fact these encodings were accessible only to him and five or six loyal workers, who helped put him where he was. Before he accused anybody, he’d better make damned straight he knew for sure.
This made for an odd assignment for D.I. because we specialize in the post mortem version of what, when, where, how, and why. We gather after-the-fact evidence, so when the case comes to trial, the prosecution can go right for the jugular. The D.A. likes nothing better than knowing the only thing the defense can do is to throw itself on the mercy of the court, hoping, in the end, their clients might be allowed to keep their pants.
Normally, I’m what is called a ferret, although I’m sure there’s a more official term. Dressed in my finery and wielding a lot of power, I’m sent in while distraught personnel are mopping up the mess left behind. I find out exactly what happened when no one was paying attention, and I am quite good at what I do.
However, this time I was in beforehand and undercover. Bingo Bango only hired computer techies, software engineers, and programmers on the sunny side of twenty-five. Even I couldn’t fake that. They had no need for any level of administration at all, as like most start-ups, the officers with initials after their names like CEO, CFO, and COO were used to doing all the secretarial work themselves, in between learning how to shave. Any small amount of administrative work left was done by the office manager, a nasty kid called Robby Weinblatt, or by Leonard, himself.
They did, however, have an opening for an absolutely horrible job labeled Office Clerical Assistant and paying bupkis. Leonard “hired me personally” without going through normal office procedures. Thus was born an underpaid, struggling Hispanic, single mother of three from East Palo Alto trying to make ends meet. It was a far cry from the glamour puss jobs I held during our normal investigations and required doing everything but cleaning toilets.
No Versace dresses, Bruno Magli heels, fancy offices or power lunches. And I was feeling slightly put out about it, although I would never have admitted it to Lila. I like to pretend I’m above that sort of thing. You know, that I can take or leave my Prada.
On the bright side, every morning I climbed into a pair of baggy, black polyester slacks, one of three K-Mart blouses, and my thrift store tennis shoes. I would slick my short, wavy hair back with gel and hit the road. No makeup, jewelry, stockings, or heels, none of the trappings of the modern day executive businesswoman. The total time of office preparation was four minutes, if you counted my three-minute shower.
Then I would drive my car to a parking lot in East Palo Alto, only to take public transportation to Mountain View, a township south of Palo Alto. The woman I was supposed to be lived in EPA and couldn’t afford a heap, much less my own classic, ‘57 Chevy, an expensive gift from my father before he died.
In my current guise, I waited for buses or walked wherever I went. By the time I arrived at work at eight a.m., I was already pooped. I reversed the process at the end of the day, getting home at around seven-thirty p.m. when I became the Wedding Planner. All this cloak and dagger stuff combined with taking on a soup to nuts wedding takes its toll, let me tell you. I hadn’t even had time to watch any black and white movies on AMC in weeks. I was having Barbara Stanwyck withdrawals.
“Tell me about the problems you are encountering at Bingo Bango,” Mom said.
“There’s this jerky office manager, Robby Weinblatt, a kid who gives the word ‘dork’ new meaning. He’s been hovering around me for the last few days.”
“Why is Mr. Weinblatt hovering around you?”
“Let’s not call him ‘mister’ even though he wears the label of office manager. He’s barely nineteen years old.”
“Do you think he suspects?”
I sat thinking about Robby Weinblatt for a moment. “I’m not sure. He is on my case, and I catch him looking at me all the time, but I can’t think of anything I’ve done. You know how careful I’ve been about taking public transportation. I devote three and a half hours a day to just commuting. I don’t know how people from Los Baños commute to the Bay Area every day. I just don’t.”
“You’re getting sidetracked, Liana. We don’t care about the people in Los Baños.”
“That’s a little heartless, I must say.”
“Liana,” Mom threatened quietly.
“Sorry. Anyway, my Latino accent is good. I don’t think I could get tripped up except by getting into a deep conversation with a native speaker. My demeanor is very subservient. I do a good job, and there have been no complaints I know of. I don’t talk on the cellphone unless I’m by myself in what is laughingly called the ladies’ room. I haven’t used the mini-scanner or flash recorder, because I haven’t found anything yet.”
“Do you think Leonard is wrong? That no one is actually stealing his encoding?”
“You mean, is it just a coincidence?” I mulled that over for a moment. “Mom, Richard says there’s no way two people in two separate companies could be coming up with the same strings of coding simultaneously. He says they’re too intricate and involved. I’m going with Richard’s gut on this. He should know.”
Lila sighed. “Very well. This has already cost Leonard quite a bit of money for our services, even with us giving him a discount.” Mom alw
ays has her eye on the dollar.
“One thing I have noticed, Lila, is these computer guys are very careful about what they put online or on their computers, but when it comes to what they throw in the trash can, it’s another matter,” I said, using her given name. When it came to business, calling each other by our first names was less confusing for clients and had become habit after all these years, even privately. “You’d blush at some of the things I’ve found going through their piles of waste every night. If I see one more picture of a pair of gigantaboobs—”
“Young men are known for their raging hormones,” Lila interrupted. “But we’ll talk about it later, Liana, when we meet.” Richard was back from his conference in Las Vegas, so the plan was to meet a little after five, when my karate lesson was over. I had been sloughing off lately, and I needed to keep up my level or turn in my black belt.
“Oh and Mateo wants to speak with you again.” She handed the phone over without saying goodbye.
“I have made something special for you, mija.” Tío’s voice came as a welcomed contrast to my mother’s. “I will bring it now while it’s warm. Then I will show you one of Tugger’s new tricks. We have practiced throughout the week.”
“Tugger knows a new trick?” I asked with excitement.
“Si. You will be pleasantly surprised, I think. Now is good?”
“Now is perfect, and I’m starving,” I said, laughing. “And by the way, I will probably be amazed, not surprised. I can’t get the cat to do squat, Tio.”
I had just finished setting the dining room table when he arrived. I opened the door to the smells of a tray full of Machaca Con Huevos and jalapeño corn cakes. After giving Tío some coffee, I sat down and stuffed my face, while he watched.
When I came up for air, I looked at Tío, noticing that despite his youthful smile, his hair and eyebrows were flecked with white. Tío was getting older, and the thought of it made my throat tighten.
With my Tia’s recent passing and my Dad’s death two years before, he and Mom decided to try living together under the same roof, at least for a while. That roof being atop a two-story, five bedroom, six bath structure, complete with carved columns at the front door and a hot tub and pool in the back. Mom roams the second floor with the study and Tio’s taken the ground level with the kitchen, where he cooks for her and some of the dietary cases from the local SPCA. He’s a big animal person.
Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries Boxed Set: Books 1-3 (The Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries) Page 27
