by Jerold Last
“I’ll do my part with Ernesto, and I’m sure that you’ll do yours with Maria-Elena, but it would be a whole lot better if we had someone in Buenos Aires who could do exactly the same thing with Juan at the same time, directly and with a little bit of force. In the meantime, be careful. We don’t know where anybody actually is, or what the Sanchez brothers might do to protect their siblings if any of them were in a tight spot. And we don't know who is leaking information to whom in that family.”
“I’ll be careful, Roger. Please make sure that you’re just as careful!”
I met Martin in the lobby. He drove us over to Ernesto's apartment, where we rang the bell and woke him up.
Ernesto came to the door in the same clothes he was wearing yesterday, just a little more rumpled. Giving Martin a careful look, he motioned him to enter and to sit on a chair in the living room. Ernesto made an elaborate mime performance of stepping back out of my reach so I couldn’t hit him while he gestured that I should sit in another chair next to Martin.
"Did you spend a long night studying last night?" Martin asked with sarcastic sympathy.
"No," replied the obviously hung-over and somewhat bleary eyed Ernesto, "It was more like I spent a long night drinking and partying. Do you mind if I start a pot of coffee brewing and take a couple of aspirins before I have to answer any more questions?"
"No problem," Martin assured him. "Take all the time you need, as long as it isn't more than 5 minutes."
In 5 minutes all three of us were sitting in the living room, Martin and I on chairs, Ernesto on a couch with coffee and aspirin on a small table alongside the couch. Also on the table was a small, voice activated, pocket digital recorder of Martin's to complement the mood he was trying to establish.
Martin started the interrogation with a formal recitation of the date, time, who was present, and the purpose of the meeting. Then he started asking questions.
"Are you giving this statement voluntarily and willingly?"
"Yes".
"Did you kill your father, Andres Sanchez?"
"No of course not."
"Do you know who did kill him?"
After the slightest of hesitations, he answered, "No, I don't."
"Do you know anything about your father's business interests?"
"I know he was an investment banker, and that he had a large number of clients who paid him to invest money on their behalf, especially in real estate and land holdings."
"What can you tell us about his drug business?"
After another slight hesitation, Ernesto replied, "Nothing. I don't know anything about drugs and I refuse to believe my father was involved in any way in selling drugs."
The interview continued this way for 5 or 10 more minutes with the questioning continuing to be variations on these themes. Ernesto seemed to be answering all of the questions and cooperating with us, but he had nothing to say beyond denying all knowledge of his father's business activities as either a banker or a drug dealer.
Martin stood up, made an elaborate ritual of turning off the recorder, and turned to me.
"He's all yours," he announced. "See if you can soften him up a little bit before we continue."
I walked up to Ernesto, stood directly in front of him, and slapped his face several times, back and forth, back and forth. I could see tears in his eyes, but he just sat there and took the slapping.
Martin turned the recorder back on, and asked the same questions again. He got exactly the same answers.
We repeated the drill two more times---all of Martin's questions getting bland "I don't know anything" answers---more face slapping----more non-answers to questions---more face slapping. Eventually, we were ready to give up. Either the kid was tougher than we thought or he was telling us the truth, or at least answering truthfully as he knew it.
We headed back to the hotel to wait for Suzanne and Eduardo's return.
After we were safely in the car driving back I looked over at Martin, who was sitting to my left driving his car. “What do you think of Ernesto as a candidate to be Mr. X?”
He took a quick glance over at me, turned back to concentrating on driving in the heavy traffic, and replied, “Pretty much exactly the same as yesterday. He’s either completely innocent of the killings, but knows, or thinks he knows, who the real murderer is, or else he’s a great actor and very scared that if we think we’ve found out for sure that he’s Mr. X, we’ll kill him. How about you, Roger, what do you think?”
I paused for a few moments to collect my thoughts. “I think that if I were Ernesto, and I was also Mr. X, this is exactly the way I’d have played it. He’s too young to be credible to professional drug dealers as the big boss so he’d have to protect his anonymity while he’s making his big moves to take over the gang. I suspect that if he’d told his father that he wanted to jump the queue over his two older brothers and take over the family business we’d have heard the old man laughing all the way downtown. I’m reasonably certain that he knows all about the family business and where all the money is coming from. I’m equally sure that he’s a physical coward. He has exactly the right personality type to sit and do nothing while I’m in front of him slapping him silly but I'm sure he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot me in the back if he had a chance to do it without getting caught.”
By then we were almost half way back to the hotel and I told Martin to start looking for a place to park.
Chapter 17. Face to face with Mr. X
About half an hour after martin and I left the hotel Suzanne and Eduardo met in the hotel's lobby and drove over to Maria-Elena's apartment.
They went upstairs and rang the bell. Maria-Elena had also slept late. She opened the door wearing only a sexy negligee and an ultra-short robe. She invited us in, commenting to Eduardo as he passed by her how she hadn't expected him this morning, especially with his chaperone. Maria-Elena disappeared into the kitchen, returning after a moment with a tray containing three cups of coffee, spoons, napkins, a pitcher of milk, and a bowl of sugar.
"Let's sit in the dining room, have a cup of coffee, and then you can ask me whatever you came here to ask," she said to Eduardo, pointedly ignoring Suzanne in the process.
They arranged themselves around the small light card table that served as a flat surface on which to eat continental breakfasts, and sipped some coffee. Suzanne asked for her coffee hot and black. Eduardo looked up at Maria-Elena and broke the awkward silence.
"I have the impression that there's something you've wanted to tell me the last few days, but haven't. Is this a good time to talk?"
"Perhaps," she answered softly doing a little trick with her eyes and mouth to look sultry. "But it would be a whole lot easier to talk if there were just the two of us here."
"No can do," replied Eduardo falling completely into his persona of the cheap muscle guy that accompanies the boss to a meeting of smarter crooks. "Suzanne here decided it was time that you and her had a heart-to-heart talk about some important stuff, so here we are."
For the first time since their arrival Maria-Elena looked closely at Suzanne. She frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then smiled and spoke directly to her.
"I take it that I can assume you're not here to talk about buying land along the Uruguay River or laundering large sums of questionably acquired cash?"
"What the heck?" thought Suzanne, I did drama in high school and can play my role at least as convincingly as Eduardo is playing his. He wouldn't have set it up this way if he didn't trust me to pull this off. And Roger wouldn't have told her in the hotel room just before she came here that he was pretty sure that Maria-Elena had to be Mr. X but that it would be pretty much impossible to prove it if they didn't get her to open up and incriminate herself this morning. Since Suzanne had also deduced the same thing, this seemed to be her big chance to do something about it. And, for the first time, her intuition was telling her that Eduardo had also come to the same conclusion.
"No, we're here to stop playing stupid games and to sta
rt talking turkey. What will it take to convince you to stop the killing and take on some full partners who can supply you with all of the things you don't have, but that you need, to take over the local drug racket here in town? We've got the connections you don't have with the cops in two countries, the guns, the muscle, the full cooperation of the Chileans, and a lot more experience buying and selling drugs on a large scale than you do."
"Suppose I were to tell you that I don't have the slightest idea of what you're talking about?" replied Maria Elena coolly.
Suzanne thought quickly. It looked like Maria-Elena must have taken that same high school drama class she had. Maria-Elena hadn't revealed a thing. Her words and her body language denied the accusation. Suzanne decided to up the ante a little bit more with an explicit threat.
"You would have missed a great opportunity to become partners with us, and it might be a good idea to buy some additional life insurance as fast as you can."
"Purely hypothetically, what are you offering if I were to agree with any of this nonsense?" the Uruguayan sexpot countered.
"You get to stay alive, we supply protection and connections, and everything we make gets split 50-50."
"Eduardo, baby, what do you have to say here? Are you going to help the beautiful little Uruguayan lady in distress?"
"Sorry, Maria-Elena, but this is business and I'm here with Suzanne."
Suzanne picked up her coffee cup and pretended to take a small sip while she watched Maria-Elena closely. She sensed that this was the moment of decision for everyone at the table.
Maria-Elena made a sudden motion and a small semi-automatic pistol appeared as if by magic in her right hand as she started to stand up. Suzanne was a lot quicker. She was already standing, and the cup of hot coffee in her hand was hurled directly at Maria-Elena's head. Maria-Elena screamed in pain as the hot liquid hit her eyes and face. Suzanne pushed the table over, moved around the fallen table with the speed of a feral cat, and landed several lightning-like kicks to the elbow of the arm holding the gun, to a knee, and to Maria Elena's face multiple times. It was over in seconds. Suzanne stood over the other woman, who lay on the floor moaning in shock and pain, with a broken arm, a dislocated knee, a broken nose, and a broken jaw.
"Eduardo, pick up the pistol very carefully so her fingerprints remain intact and easily recovered. I just happen to have a Zip-lock sealable plastic bag in my pocket that it should fit into. I'm betting it will be a .32 caliber and that the bullets will match the ones in her father's body. If I'm right, that's all we'll need to get Mr. X here spending the rest of her life in jail.
"Give Martin a call. I suspect that he and Roger are already sitting right downstairs waiting to hear from you. We can leave all the formalities here to Martin."
Less than 5 minutes later the apartment was full with four vertical people and one still horizontal.
"Nice work, you two. I don't think Maria-Elena will dazzle anybody with her beauty anymore," said Martin coldly as he looked down at the still moaning killer.
"This should be an open and shut case of murder. And, I suspect that cutting the head off the monster should end our local drug wars. We'll arrest as many of the dealers as we can, but in the long run the demand and the profits will still be there, so new dealers will replace the old. On the other hand, with the Sanchez family implicated up to their ears, the bank will probably have all of its assets frozen and seized, which will be a huge windfall for Montevideo. Maybe some of that money will be used for good programs that can offset all of the death and crime we've had lately."
Eduardo had recorded the entire meeting and made a small contribution to the evidence benevolent fund. In addition Maria-Elena had been careless enough to leave a lot of very incriminating paper in various places in her apartment filled with names, dates, and peso value of all sorts of drug-related transactions, so Martin had a treasure trove of evidence to analyze, study, classify, and use in subsequent trials of the drug dealers from both the old and the new gangs.
We took off for lunch leaving Martin to clean up the mess Suzanne had left behind.
At lunch with Eduardo, Bruce, and Robert, we discussed the case.
"Your strategy turned out to be brilliant, Roger. How did you ever get the initial idea that you could get the two factions each believing that the other group was out to get them and redirect them towards fighting each other to smoke out the killer?" asked Eduardo.
"I love the old classic mystery writers who invented the California P.I. novel as a mystery genre. One of Dashiell Hammett's more obscure novels, his first one published of the five books he wrote, was Red Harvest. It was the basis for a movie called Last Man Standing, which was my source for a lot of the ideas I had on this case. I can't claim a whole lot of originality for most of my moves since we got to Montevideo. The credit for solving this case probably should go to Dashiell Hammett and his first private detective character, The Continental Op."
"And you, Suzanne, how did you manage to deduce that Mr. X was really Ms. X?" queried Eduardo.
"I too love the old classic mystery writers who invented the California P.I. novel as a mystery genre. That's one of the many interests Roger and I share. So I'd guess we both got there the same way. I started thinking about mystery novel plots and the light went off in my head. I suddenly saw Carmen Sternwood shooting Rusty Regan in Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep". Once I stopped thinking of Mr. X in a gender-specific way, everything we knew fell into place. It certainly made a lot more sense if Maria-Elena was making sure she was a few steps ahead of Eduardo and us than that she was attracted to older men. I'm very sorry, Eduardo. You know I think of you not only as a friend and the older brother I never had, but also as an attractive hunk. Even so I don't think I could ever have been attracted to you as strongly, purely on a physical basis, as Maria -Elena appeared to be during and after your first meeting."
Eduardo chuckled a bit. "I didn't think so either, so I suspected that she was deeply involved in all of this killing and gang war from the beginning. That seemed to be a darn good reason to let her believe that I was thinking more with my cojones than with my brain and let her seduce me. I assume Roger also suspected her from the beginning."
"This is a fine time to be telling me all of this, Eduardo," continued Suzanne. "You could have made this a lot easier for me if you had shared your suspicions. Once I started thinking in those terms, the whole thing became clear---why Mr. X had to keep her identity a secret, how the killer was able to get as close to the old man as she did even when he was bound to be hyper-suspicious of any visitors, what the motive for the drug war was, even why Jose Gonzalez and Carlos Cavernas had to die because they both knew too much since they knew that Maria-Elena was "Mr." X---and why she seemed to be hiding secrets from you ever since you let her seduce you, Eduardo. And I'm sorry I didn't trust you to know exactly what you were doing and to try to figure out your reasons."
Suzanne walked over to Roger, put an arm around his shoulder affectionately, and asked, “What do we want to call this crazy case, Roger?”
Roger put his hand on Suzanne’s and squeezed it gently. “Well now, let’s see. One option is ‘Last Woman Standing’, but that wouldn’t be very original.
"I think maybe we should go with an odd set of coincidences on this one. We had a door mat that played a key role in getting us down here in the first place, and Eduardo had the world’s worst excuse for having a bandage on his arm, claiming he had an accident while playing matador with a wild bull. I think we have to call this one 'The Matador Murders’ in honor of both a bull fight that never took place and a doormat that moved a bit at a particularly good time for Martin.”
We went home the next day on another excruciatingly long flight. Robert did better than any of the adults, suggesting the feasibility for the family of getting lots of frequent flier miles in the near future.
Martin Gonzalez got a commendation for solving the murder of one of the wealthiest citizens of Montevideo, and a promotion and an apol
ogy from the Chief of Police, who personally apologized for the official suspicion that his best detective had killed his partner. He also had the satisfaction of getting all of the credit for a couple of dozen drug dealers and a no longer attractive murderer get sent to jail for their crimes.
At the ceremony making Martin Gonzalez a Police Captain, the Chief said, "Of course, I never doubted your innocence or integrity," proving that politicians have the same credibility everywhere in the world.
Eduardo Gomez returned to his normal life in Asuncion, Paraguay. It seemed to be a good bet that we'd meet again in the near future.
Bruce continued in his role as Robert's full-time Nanny while Suzanne returned to her career as a full-time professor at UCLA. Bruce also met my colleague Vincent Romero and they became good friends almost immediately. He began moonlighting as a bodyguard with my detective agency under Vincent's tutelage, and liked the job a lot. It seemed to be another good bet that we'd end up working a murder case together again in the near future.
