I was exactly on time. As I crossed the street, I scanned it for Chapman’s car. It didn’t take me long to spot it. It was parked a few feet down from the bar, away from the bar’s window. I glanced back quickly. George was double-parked down the block, in front of the parking lot. I pretended not to notice and went inside. Chapman was waiting for me. In his white turtleneck, tan corduroy pants, and blue ski parka, he looked as if he belonged on the slopes of Aspen. He grinned when he saw me and patted the stool next to him.
“Drink?” he asked. “It’s the least I can do.”
“Sure. Why not? Scotch, please.” I sat down and handed him the suitcase. “Here you go.”
“They’re all here?”
“All of them,” I lied. “Count them if you don’t believe me.”
“Oh, I do.”
I dug my cigarettes out of my backpack, tapped one out of the pack and lit it.
“You should quit,” Chapman observed. “It’s an expensive, dirty habit.”
“That’s what people tell me.” I took the smoke deep in my lungs and exhaled. “So, are you going home?” I asked.
“In a couple of days. I have some odds and ends to clean up.”
I felt like saying, “Is that what I am to you, an odd and end?” But didn’t.
Chapman cocked his head and studied my face. “You seem remarkably unupset about this.”
“What do you mean?”
The bartender put my drink down. I picked it up and took a sip. It tasted as if it had been bottled in Passaic, New Jersey.
“I’d expected . . .”
“That I’d carry on?” I said.
“Something like that.”
“That I’d call you a scum-sucking worthless piece of shit? What would be the point? You already know it.”
Chapman knocked the rest of his drink back. “Believe me,” he told me. “I’m not doing anything that anyone else isn’t.”
“You’re saying that I’m quixotic?”
“I’m saying you’re antediluvian.” And he slapped a ten down on the bar. “Have a couple more on me.” And he picked up the suitcase and left.
I pushed the glass away, took another puff of my cigarette, and waited. Three minutes later, I heard the crash. I smiled and walked out the door and down the block a few feet to get a better view.
George had rammed straight into Chapman’s car. The door of Chapman’s car was caved in. His bumper was hanging down. The street was covered with broken safety glass from Chapman’s front window. One thing is for sure: they definitely don’t make cars the way they used to. George hadn’t even been going that fast. I hoped the tortoises and the eggs were all right. But then, I decided they probably were. There was a lot of insulation in the suitcase they were in. Both men were standing in the middle of the street. Chapman was screaming at George.
“You fuckin’ son of a bitch!” he yelled. Chapman’s mouth was distended. His teeth were bared. He didn’t look so nice anymore.
“I said I was sorry,” George told him.
“Sorry. Sorry?” Chapman’s voice rose in a crescendo of rage.
He was reaching back in his car when George’s friend, Mike, drove up. He’d been waiting around the corner. He stepped out of his car, badged everyone and called it in. Chapman took out his badge and showed it around as if it were the Holy Grail. Mike shook his head. Chapman practically stuck the thing in Mike’s face. Mike shook his head again and said something. I couldn’t hear, so I moved a little closer. I saw George pointing to the backseat. Mike opened the door and pulled out a small suitcase and opened it up. I didn’t have to move any closer to see what was in it. I already knew. Several bags of fertilizer and two blasting caps. People take explosives a lot more seriously than they take endangered species.
“I don’t know how that got in here,” Chapman squawked.
Mike looked skeptical.
“He did it!” he yelled, pointing at George.
“Why would I do something like that?” George demanded.
Chapman came toward George. “Because you’re a friend of hers.”
“Who is her?” George asked.
I heard sirens. More squad cars were on the way. This was going to take a while to sort out. I looked at my watch. George had already alerted Fish and Wildlife. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone wasn’t up here by tomorrow. In the meantime, the tortoises would most likely be passing their time at the zoo. I went back in the bar and ordered a beer. While I was waiting for it, I called Joan and told her I was coming out tomorrow to pick up Zsa Zsa. Sitting at the bar just wasn’t the same without her.
Chapter 33
“Look,” George said. He pointed to a flock of parrots sitting in a tree alongside the dirt path we were bouncing down.
“Sure beats the crows,” I said. We were three days into our vacation in Belize and had another seven to go. I wished we had a month or more. “Littlebaum would like it down here.”
George grunted and maneuvered the Land Rover he was driving around a ditch in the road.
Of course, Littlebaum liked it in Arizona, too. At least that’s what he’d said when I’d flown down to pick up the tortoise.
“They leave you alone down here,” he’d told me as he’d fiddled with the water tank on his trailer.
Steve had sold him a large tract of land out in the desert. There was nothing there but cactus and dirt and a view of the mountains, which, as Littlebaum said, suited him fine. The land was flat and good for building. He’d already contracted to have a well drilled and had put up the cage for the monkeys, who, judging from the amount of chasing that was going on, seemed to be having a good time in their new home.
Matilda seemed to be enjoying herself, too. She’d been lying on the ground, in a patch of shade the trailer was throwing off, having a peaceful snooze when I’d driven up. Myra had been sitting beside her in a folding chair, also dozing in the sun. At the sound of my wheels, both of them had awakened, stretched, and turned to face me.
“You have a tan,” I told Myra while I gave Matilda a pet. Her fur was warm and smelled of hay.
Myra grinned and drew a line in the dirt with the toe of her sneaker. “It’s nice down here. All this sun.” She did a half pirouette. “Do you think I look too fat?”
“No. I think you look good.”
“That’s what my uncle says, too. He wants me to stay with him. I don’t know.” She wound a lock of hair around her finger. “Maybe I will. Listen,” she continued. “I want to apologize.”
“For what?”
“For hitting you over the head.”
“That was you?”
She fidgeted.
“I thought you’d come to get the stuff I took from Eli’s apartment.” She gave a slight shrug. “I guess I got paranoid.”
“But I didn’t see you.”
“I know. I was next door. I saw you snooping around through the window.” Myra drew a circle in the dirt with her toe. “I was angry.” Then she added, “I was angry a lot.”
“Look at that,” said George, interrupting my thoughts and bringing me back to the present.
I watched a large iguana run across the path and vanish into the undergrowth.
“This is amazing,” George remarked as we hit another bump.
“Isn’t it, though.” I grabbed on to the seat and brushed a branch from a tree away from my face.
We’d gone to town to get supplies and the day’s mail for George’s cousin, Andre. Now we were returning. The path we were following, more of a track really, was just above the Macal River. When we got to the drop-off spot, we were supposed to use the CB radio mounted on the dashboard to contact Andre, at which point he’d come get us with the outboard and ferry us back across the river.
“So you still think what we did was wrong?” I asked as we went over another rut. I winced as my head hit the Land Rover’s ceiling.
George kept his eyes firmly fixed ahead of him. “If I had thought it was wrong I wouldn’t have done it.” He bit
his lip as we went over another ditch. I remembered what Andre had said about this road sometimes being impassable during the rainy season. “However,” George continued, “I’m not proud of it. I don’t think manufacturing evidence is the way to go. Even in this case. Even when we’re right.”
“Even when the guy is a murderer?”
“Even then.”
I nibbled on my fingernail. Of course we hadn’t known that Chapman had killed Nestor. No one had, especially not Sulfin, who’d already confessed to the shooting, or Adelina, who’d accused him. Then the ME had done an autopsy and found two different bullets in Nestor’s chest, one of which matched Sulfin’s gun and the other of which turned out to match the gun the police found in the nightstand in Chapman’s bedroom.
Evidently Chapman had come along after Sulfin had shot Nestor and decided to take the opportunity to finish the job. Why? If you listened to Chapman, it had been an accident. According to the story in the local paper, Chapman maintained he’d just been trying to help Nestor. He’d been bending over when his gun had gone off accidentally, putting a hole through Nestor’s heart.
Sulfin’s charge was being downgraded to assault, while Chapman was being charged with manslaughter because the DA didn’t think he’d be able to make a murder charge stick. He was probably right, I decided, brushing a mosquito away from my ear. But it didn’t really matter, because what with the other charges being lodged against him, Chapman wasn’t getting out anytime soon. Besides the manslaughter charge, he was up for violations of the Lacey Act, trafficking in endangered species, as well as possession of explosives without a license.
George gestured at the undergrowth. “I wonder if those tortoises could live here?”
“Probably.” Given what they’d been through, they seemed pretty tough.
Right now they were down in Miami awaiting shipment back to a preserve that was being set up for them in their home country. I couldn’t say the same for the eggs, though. They weren’t going anywhere. I guess we hadn’t packed them as well as we thought we had. Not one of them made it.
“How does it feel to be the savior of a species?” I joked.
George grinned.
I glanced down at the river. We were about two feet above it. The black water was rippling over the rocks. I remembered Andre saying he’d already torn the bottom out of one boat on the shoals.
“Don’t worry. We still have plenty of time to get across,” George said, reading my thoughts.
After sunset, travel on the river would be even more difficult. It was already six. It would be dark by six-thirty. Night came quickly in the tropics.
“I’m not worried.” I leaned back in my seat and smelled the flower-scented air and listened to the birdsong. “You know,” I said, “I could definitely live here for a while.”
“Doing what?”
“What Andre’s doing.”
“Running a guest house? You don’t even like to cook.”
“I used to do it rather well.”
“Andre and his wife both worked in the hotel business. You’ve never done anything like that.”
“I never ran a pet store, either.”
George grunted.
In the distance, somewhere ahead of us, a howler monkey roared in the jungle. I smiled as I watched the sky turning a brilliant crimson. Tomorrow, we were going to go visit the Mayan ruins of Xunantunich.
For now it was enough.
Please turn the page
for an exciting sneak peek of
Barbara Block’s newest
Robin Light mystery
BLOWING SMOKE
on sale in July 2001!
To clarify in case you’re wondering, I’m not a licensed New York State private detective. I don’t work for an agency. I don’t advertise in the Yellow Pages. My business comes to me strictly by word of mouth. I also don’t carry a gun, although I can shoot one if I have to. And have. I also run a pet store called Noah’s Ark, which specializes in exotics—read reptiles—though these days I seem to be doing more detecting and less pet storing, if I can coin a word.
I started doing investigative work to save my own ass and turned out to be good at it, good enough so that people keep asking me to help them and I keep saying yes. I usually work a handful of cases a year. Mostly, I find lost children and animals and leave the high end sexy stuff to the big boys.
It was almost eleven-thirty at night by the time I walked through the door of my house, and I was not in a good mood, possibly because I hadn’t had anything to eat since ten o’clock that morning. When I saw the blinking light on my answering machine, I was hoping it was Bethany’s parents calling to tell me their daughter had come home by herself. But it wasn’t. It was someone called Hillary Cisco, wanting to hire me to do a job for her.
Normally, I would have turned her down. I prefer giving people their money’s worth by concentrating on one thing at a time. But with the proverbial wolf at my door in the form of quarterly tax payments to good old New York State, I figured it was time to make an exception to my rule. The next morning, before I went to work, I phoned her back.
“How’d you’d get my name?” I asked her while I let James in and got a can of cat food out of the cabinet.
“Calli gave it to me.”
Calli was an old friend of mine who’d gone out to California and was now back. At the moment, she was covering the Metro section in the local paper.
“She said you’d be perfect for this.”
“Really?” As I set James’s food in front of him, I filled her in on my fees and how I worked.
It sounded fine to Hillary, so I told her I’d swing by her place later that afternoon. As I hung up, I noticed that James’s ear was torn.
“Fighting again, I see.”
He answered me with a growl. I wondered why I kept him around as I went to get the peroxide. Of course, he’d disappeared by the time I’d come back, and after searching the house for five minutes or so, I gave it up as a bad job and called Calli.
I wanted her to fill me on this Hillary Cisco, but either Calli wasn’t home or she wasn’t picking up. I left a message on her machine, got Zsa Zsa, and finally left the house. I was only twenty minutes late.
Tim, the guy who works for me, and I spent the rest of the day restocking shelves, cleaning cages, and feeding the snakes. Bad day for the mice, good day for the snakes. In between, I popped into the back, arranged to go in and have a TB test, and made calls about Bethany while I tried not to listen to the asthmatic wheeze of the store’s air conditioner.
The temperature was in the nineties, and the machine was not happy. It probably wanted a vacation, but then didn’t we all, a fact I was reminded of when I stepped outside. I was drenched in sweat by the time I walked to my car. Which didn’t improve my mood any. If I wanted heat, I’d be living in the Southwest instead of central New York.
On my way to Hillary Cisco’s, I swung by Warren Street, but Bethany wasn’t there, and after about twenty minutes or so, I gave up and drove over to Starcrest, the development in which Hillary Cisco lived. When I saw her leaning against the porch railing, I was reminded of a kid who’d been locked out of her house and was waiting for her mommy to come home. Even though she wasn’t a kid. Not even close. And 113 Wisteria Lane was her house.
Listening to her voice on the machine, I’d pictured her as blond and big-boned, but this woman was as small and brown as a wren. Her gauze dress, incongruously long-sleeved and high-hemmed, fluttered around her thighs as she came down the steps to greet me. She moved with a slow, languid pace, but then, I reflected, it was too hot to move any other way.
Her hair, straight, black, and chin-length, hung like a curtain on either side of her face. But it was her eyes I noticed. They looked as if they belonged to someone else. A pale grayish blue, they were too light for her complexion, casting a vacant expression over her features. Her eyeliner and mascara had run in the heat, smudging into dark circles underneath her eyes. Beads of moisture ringed her hai
rline. She looked tired, as if she’d been wrestling with something for a long time and lost.
“Robin Light?” she asked. In person, she sounded breathier, less self-assured than she had on the phone.
I nodded. “Hillary Cisco?”
She bobbed her head and nervously plucked at the hem of her dress, trying to make it longer. “You’re late. I thought you might have decided not to come.”
“I got lost.” I’d been circling around streets that all looked the same for the last twenty minutes, kicking up plumes of dust and growing more and more irritated by the second.
“Everyone does.” She swiped at her forehead with the back of her hand. Her arms, I realized, were exceptionally long. “They designed these roads like a maze, you know. That’s so the blacks from the inner city can’t come up here and rob us.” For a moment I couldn’t tell if she was serious or not. Then the corners of her mouth formed a slight smile. She shook her head as she contemplated the houses on either side of her. “As if they ... or anyone would.”
I followed her gaze. The place didn’t seem so bad to me, just raw in the way that new housing developments are. They were popping up all around Syracuse, siphoning off its population. In twenty years, when the trees and the hedges grew in, it would be a pleasant enough place. At six o’clock, the day was just beginning to cool off. Somewhere a cardinal was singing his song over and over again, the notes rising and falling away like a benediction.
His notes mingled with the happy shouts of children chasing each other with water guns while their parents, still in their suits from their day in the office, were busy adjusting and readjusting the hoses and sprinklers on their lawns before they went inside and changed into shorts and T-shirts.
Endangered Species Page 28
