The Matador Murders (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 4)

by Jerold Last

  Eduardo quickly answered for all three of us, once again making sure to indicate that he was in charge here to the Chilean drug dealers. I assumed that he was covering for us just in case anything went wrong. "You should think of us as private citizens, which strictly speaking all three of us are in Uruguay and Chile. We have a friend in Uruguay who asked us to come down here and help him to clear himself of a murder charge. The murder seems to be part of the drug-related violence we've been hearing about. I think we're all on the same side here, so cooperation is logical.

  "In the spirit of sharing resources, I can tell you that we've just heard that Andres Sanchez was murdered yesterday in Montevideo. It appears that "the new guard" seems to be getting bolder in its attacks on "the old guard". There were no suspects in the murder as of last night when I spoke to our source."

  Octavio looked simultaneously surprised, disturbed, and thoughtful at this piece of news. "Thank you, that is a useful piece of information that I should have heard from my own sources in Uruguay, but didn't. Would you like to tell me anything else about your plans for the future?"

  "We will continue to enjoy your hospitality today. The three of us would welcome any suggestions you might have about what we should do, or who we should get in contact with, after we return to Uruguay tonight," responded Eduardo formally.

  Octavio handled Eduardo's rebuff with his customary graciousness. "I'll give you a little bit more help in Montevideo, as much as I can. I'll instruct all of my people there to cooperate with you to the extent they feel comfortable doing so. You can assume that anyone Chilean that you meet in your professional capacity is one of my people. These are people like Bernardo O'Higgins that I believe can be trusted. However, at this point I can't be completely sure about anyone. In return I only ask that you will please let me know if any of them should not be trusted before you leave to return to the United States."

  Octavio segued seamlessly back into farmer mode and identified the different varieties of grapes growing in the fields. Some of the varietals like Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir were familiar to us; some I had never heard of. Some were wine grapes while others were table grapes. The table grapes fetched very good prices from the Japanese merchants for export, but were fragile and could only be picked by hand, so were expensive to grow and harvest. They were disease prone, and had to be grown with minimal pesticide use, so were not always guaranteed to be ready to pick when the harvest time arrived. It was, as Octavio put it, "high risk, high reward" agriculture.

  Beyond the vineyards was a cultivated area comprising several hectares of flat land irrigated from a nearby well. Growing in the fields were very young plants that Octavio identified as a variety of tomato similar to the large beefsteak tomatoes grown in the USA. The plants were larger and further apart than what Suzanne and I were used to seeing in California, and they were obviously being cultivated by hand, not by tractors and other farm machines.

  Octavio explained, “These tomatoes are also being grown for export to the Japanese market. The most important thing they want in a Japanese market is an organically grown tomato that is perfectly shaped and has no defects when the shopper examines it in the store. They are willing to pay a lot of money for perfect tomatoes like that, which justifies doing everything by hand labor. This is, by far, our most profitable crop. Each tomato is checked daily to make sure that it is not shaded by leaves from itself or another plant, that there aren’t too many tomatoes on a plant so that each can grow as large as possible, and that any worms we see are removed by hand and killed elsewhere so no eggs are left behind. Each tomato is individually harvested at the perfect stage for it to ripen during the time it is being shipped to Japan. We handle all of the steps involved in harvesting and processing each tomato from farm to cargo container in Santiago, so there are no middlemen that have to make a profit between farm and shipment. Believe it or not, the wholesale price we can charge for each tomato is a couple of dollars. And the tomato dealers in Japan are only too happy to pay that price, which is less than half of what it costs to grow the same quality of tomato in Japan.”

  We saw pastures with horses for riding, some sheep and cattle grazing over grass that would eventually be butchered for their meat, and a large wired-in area for hens that produced eggs for breakfasts, general cooking, and sale in the Farmer’s Market held Saturday mornings in San Tomas de Aconcagua. We saw pretty much everything there was to see on the farm. The only thing lacking was a young bull for Eduardo to practice his matador skills upon.

  Lunch was served in the yard alongside the house, with a nice view of the flock of goats and the fields beyond. The table was set for six, but at the moment there were just the four of us walking towards the table, and a man with his back to us, who turned out to be Octavio’s father, sitting in a comfortable chair. He stood to greet us using his cane for support as we approached. The older gentleman effortlessly assumed the role of gracious host. He was at least 6 feet tall, distinguished looking in his slacks, shirt, and tie of earlier this morning now accompanied by a sport jacket, and exuded old world charm. He had to be at least in his mid-70s, perhaps older, but he looked and acted much younger. Octavio introduced each of us once again in turn to his father, Miguel, who assured us that he remembered us from our earlier meeting over breakfast.

  The five of us sat in an arc along the edge of the table. Miguel invited us to help ourselves from a selection of fruit, the goat cheese we had seen being made earlier, oysters, and well-chilled white wine. The oysters, small and succulent, were served on the half shell embedded in ice. It turned out that they were only available at the San Tomas Farmer's market on Fridays, so we had been lucky. The wine was a varietal I wasn’t familiar with, dry and crisp, and perfectly complemented the oysters and the cheese. We were treated to small talk about the farm, the family, and Miguel’s many business ventures in Santiago. He was a retired scientist, but was still active on the Board of Directors of several Chilean and multinational companies, especially those in the pharmaceutical, wine, and food products industries. Miguel, who obviously enjoyed playing the gracious host, had a wealth of interesting anecdotes to share and dominated the conversation while we waited for Alicia to join us on the patio for the real lunch to come.

  With strong urging, and the comment that "We have fresh oysters all the time", Miguel encouraged us to finish off all of the oysters and the white wine.

  One of his stories was quite personal and made an impression on us.

  “After I received my Master’s degree in chemistry after World War II, I had to decide whether to be the eighth or ninth generation of farmer in my family or go into industry where I would make a lot more money. It was a difficult decision to make because in those days it took almost an entire day to get from Santiago to San Tomas de Aconcagua by bus or car. I loved the land and the lifestyle here, but all of the opportunities were in the capital city. My wife and I spent many days and nights discussing this choice, but we finally decided that for the good of the family I would let my brothers do the farming while I earned the money that it would take to improve and modernize the family farms in the future to come. I’ve never regretted that choice as it turned out that I have an aptitude for business that has allowed all of us to keep the family’s land holdings intact while our extended family has grown and flourished.

  "Octavio seems to have inherited my talents and has very graciously continued everything I began. Our family is quite religious, as you've probably noticed, so there have been a lot of mouths to feed and some of my sons and their families have needed more help than others. There is a clear understanding that what Octavio and I earn in our various business activities includes a certain amount that is to be returned on a regular basis to the other brothers here in San Tomas to maintain and improve the family's farms and houses, what we call their inheritance."

  I checked out the local body language. Grandpa oozed family pride, while Octavio exuded love and respect for Grandpa. It was easy to forget that the local versio
n of paradise was funded by drug money, and easy to embrace the concept that the end justified the means. This was certainly something that I'd be thinking about a lot more during the long flight home.

  Octavio's wife Alicia came out and lunch was served. Alicia now played the role of hostess. What we had eaten thus far was just the appetizers! We still had an enormous lunch to eat to complement the appetizers we had already eaten. A couple of maids brought the food in several bowls---soup, meat, cold chicken, fresh vegetables, the hot Chilean salsa called Pebre, freshly sliced tomatoes, freshly baked bread, and more goat cheese. The maids served us large portions of everything, accompanied by a full bodied and fruity red wine (probably a Cabernet Sauvignon).

  After another hour or so of eating and chatting we left the table totally satiated and vowing to begin our diets immediately. Miguel was curious about Suzanne's research, and knew enough chemistry to ask about details of the methods and equipment she used to do her experiments in the laboratory. He had been to Los Angeles several times, as had Octavio, so we played the game of "have you been to...."? We walked fifty meters or so from the table to Octavio's preferred vehicle for traveling between the various Cortes family farms on the bumpy roads that connected the different properties.

  We climbed into our seats and Octavio drove us over to his brother’s house, about 3-4 miles away over a paved farm road, in one of the trucks from the farm. We motored up another long driveway to another huge house. Sitting or playing in the front yard was another family right out of a nostalgic Hollywood movie from the 1950s: an ideal nuclear family consisting of a father who looked a lot like Octavio, an attractive mother who looked like she had everything under control, and four very healthy looking teenagers, two boys and two girls, playing vigorously in a large swimming pool set into a corner of the front yard. Octavio introduced each of us to his brother and sister-in-law, and pointed at the kids while repeating their names, which I promptly forgot.

  The star of the show was the house, which was huge and old. This turned out to be the 300-year-old family house we had been told about. It looked like an old movie set from a South American plantation of the 18th century. It was built with stucco coated adobe bricks, made locally, and finished with beige colored paint all around. Frequent windows with green shutters supplied ventilation. The roof was Spanish style, made of tile with a steep pitch. Rain gutters surrounded the house and routed the infrequent rainwater into cisterns for storage. Both the front and back of the house had porches or verandas covered with a shade trellis supported by wooden pillars painted white to make sitting and entertainment areas that were outdoors, but cool and shaded. Hand-made wooden furniture---chairs, tables, a couch or two---created designated areas to sit and talk. A fountain with a complicated religious icon as a centerpiece greeted all visitors as a prominent feature of the arcade in front. The house and grounds were well maintained and the swimming pool in back looked to have been custom made to fit the available space.

  It seemed quite unlikely that the farm itself generated the income that it must have taken to maintain and modernize a place like this, even with the $2 tomatoes as one of the crops. I made a mental note that Octavio's brother seemed to have a source of extra income besides his farm, even though Octavio had told us that he was a full-time farmer. Was the extra money coming from the drug trade? Could he be involved with whoever was responsible for the murders in Montevideo? I looked over at Suzanne, who was obviously thinking exactly the same thoughts I was.

  The next hour or so was spent in the Chilean version of a suburban back yard, watching teen aged kids play and chatting with the neighbors. Octavio's brother Septimus was relaxed and cheerful as he told us about his life in San Tomas de Aconcagua. He was very much the gentleman farmer, overseeing the production of various fruits and vegetables, as well as pork, chickens, eggs, and veal on a huge fully mechanized farm that employed mainly seasonal workers except for a small core of full time skilled workers. We got a not too plausible, but possible, explanation of the brother’s source of extra income when he referred vaguely to "an inheritance" while discussing how he mechanized the farm when he took it over from his father's direct supervision. This may well have been the "inheritance" we had heard about earlier, laundered drug money.

  Septimus was charming and a very good storyteller. He offered us several varieties of wine with cheese and fruit, and the time passed quickly. If he were a big time drug dealer, he certainly concealed it effectively with a thick facade of Rotary businessman and an affable external persona.

  My favorite story of those Septimus told was another bit of family history. They had a great, great, granduncle that was a well-known bandit and horse thief who had terrorized the valley in the later part of the 19th Century. After establishing a reputation that rivaled Black Bart's in California, he eventually found local law enforcement getting very close to capturing him. He and his wife fled to southern Chile where they crossed the Andes to Argentina, and continued eastward to Uruguay with enough stolen money and horses to buy a large estancia and live a very good life. However, there must have been a genetic flaw in that branch of the family tree, as one or two of the children, Septimus and Octavio's great granduncles, became thieves in Uruguay. The trans-generational criminality continued in a similar pattern. Septimus didn't know what had become of his Uruguayan relatives, who had long since gotten out of contact with the family in Chile, but he firmly believed that if any of them had survived into the present time, they would be engaged in some lucrative criminal activity in Montevideo or the Uruguayan countryside.

  Octavio's limousine appeared suddenly with our driver from yesterday and our overnight bags. The driver announced that it was time to head directly to the airport to catch our LAN Chile flight back to Uruguay. The plane would get us there in plenty of time to spend a while with Robert before he went to sleep and we went to dinner. There were firm handshakes and firm abrazos all around and we were in the car driving southeast.

  We arrived early at the Santiago International airport for our flight to Montevideo, the last flight to Uruguay of the day, cleared airport security, customs, and immigration, and walked towards the gate to wait for our flight. Santiago airport’s international terminal is laid out with a long central corridor that has gates branching off the corridor on one side and shops and restaurants on the other.

  Eduardo suggested that we stop at a completely empty gate area that was not populated by any passengers and did not have a plane waiting for boarding. “I want to call Martin, and thought we might take advantage of the privacy here to put this call on speakerphone.”

  The call went through rapidly and Eduardo told Martin that the three of us were in a secure location and that he was switching to speaker mode so that we could all listen in.

  “We’ll be back to Montevideo and should have cleared customs in about three hours,” he told Martin. “Our car is parked in the airport parking lot, so we should be back to the hotel in less than four hours. You may want to meet us there so we can catch up on things. In the meantime, a lot of people in Chile know we’re investigating the drug scene in Uruguay, so any anonymity we might have had is completely shot. It may have been shot anyway based on our visit to Andres Sanchez, but we’ll probably never know whether or not we blew our cover with that visit.

  "In the meantime, our only real advantage is that they almost certainly assume we’re a rival gang from somewhere else trying to take over their turf and they can easily scare us off with threats of beatings or showing us their knives. The last thing in the world that we want to have happen is that they start thinking we're cops. There were already at least two gangs fighting it out for this territory before we got here. We want them to think that every time one of their gang disappears, it's the other gang's fault. So, Roger has suggested that the next time somebody attacks us in Montevideo, just in case that happens, we agree beforehand that we’ll kill all of them so it looks like the gang war is escalating and their troops are changing sides. In that case, y
our job will be to clean up the mess so we don’t have to deal with Uruguayan law.”

  “I know we've talked about this before, but isn’t that a little extreme?” asked Martin's voice through the tinny little telephone speaker.

  “No, I don’t think so,” replied Eduardo forcefully. “There have been what, five killings this week that we know about already? These guys are playing for keeps. I think we have to assume that they would kill us if they really knew what they were up against, which are just four people. Granted, we may be very special people, but they have the advantage of virtually unlimited manpower. And I honestly don’t want to have to deal with some hotshot druggie with a rifle and a telescopic sight taking target practice on me from a couple of hundred meters away.”

  “I can do what you're asking for,” said Martin’s voice over the phone. “Use some common sense before you kill half of the criminals in Montevideo, but I trust your and Roger's judgment and both of your instincts.”

  We said our good-byes and hung up, then walked the rest of the way to our gate, which had already started collecting passengers for our flight.

  Eduardo turned to Suzanne and asked her quite sincerely, “Are you OK with what we just agreed to, Suzanne? I know you’ve been squeamish in the past about Roger and my using lethal force as a solution to administering justice when it seemed to be indicated.”