Tanzi's Game (Vince Tanzi Book 3)

by C I Dennis

  It had felt good.

  Which meant nothing now, seeing how I had dumped her as my P.T., and then she had nearly kicked my ass, after nearly jumping my bones. Talk about conflicting signals—from both of us. In my next life I want to be a starfish: they can reproduce asexually, so there is no need to hang around in bars, get all hot and bothered with a potential mate, and then weave home, three-quarters in the bag just because nature made you do it. Everything would be so much simpler without sex, although if sex didn’t exist, neither would most of the world’s great literature, theater, art, film, photography, music, or strip clubs, and that would be a shame.

  The houses on my road are modest by Vero standards, and my development hadn’t spent a lot on amenities. The nearest streetlight was several houses away from mine, so when I approached the parked van I almost ran into it. Instead, I swerved, and I continued on beyond my driveway because I recognized the vehicle. The Iturbe brothers’ blacked-out minivan was parked across from my house, where they could see anyone who was coming or going.

  I drove down the street and rounded the corner. The house on the block that was directly behind ours was vacant, and I quietly pulled the BMW into the driveway. It was too dark to proceed without a light, so I used the one on my phone, which was one of the most useful features on the device. I crossed the backyard and swung my legs over the low wall that divided the properties and led into my own yard. I quietly let myself inside my house through the patio door.

  First, I checked the bedrooms and the study to make sure that everyone was still there and to confirm that the two gangbangers hadn’t already done something awful. Royal was asleep at Barbara’s breast, and Susanna and Roberto were slumbering on opposing couches in the study. After that, I carefully entered the garage and selected a crowbar from the tool rack. I left the house from the back door, the same way I’d come in, and returned to my car, where I removed a GPS tracker and my sawed-off shotgun from the trunk. I called the gun my lupo, like they did in the mobster films—it was an intimidating weapon with an eighteen-inch barrel that measured just long enough to make it legal in Florida. Legal, and lethal.

  I decided that the best way to do this would be from behind, so I rounded the block on foot from the other direction and proceeded up my street toward the rear of the van. If they happened to look in their mirrors, they would see me. Fine. Anyone who was dumb enough to stake out my goddamn house had it coming. If they got out of the van, I would shoot.

  Nobody got out. Stakeouts are mind-numbingly boring, and I’d dozed off more than once while doing them as a P.I. The Iturbe brothers were probably in dreamland. I quietly snapped the GPS tracker’s magnets onto a U-Haul hitch under the back bumper, and crept along the side of the van until I reached the driver’s window. An XXL-sized human being was seated in the front with his head leaned back against the headrest, and I could tell that he was asleep. I didn’t see anyone in the passenger seat, so maybe I was dealing with one brother, not two. Either way, I wanted them gone.

  My left side may be messed up from my accident, but my right side works fine. I swung the crowbar in a wide arc and slammed it into the driver’s window, creating a shower of fragments that covered the sleeping figure in broken glass. I shifted the shotgun to my right hand and pointed it at his face.

  “What the fuck?” he screamed.

  “You can leave,” I said. “But if you come back here, I’ll kill you.”

  “Fuck you, man,” he said. I could see him now—he was the one with the braid. No one else was in the vehicle.

  “Drive safe,” I said. He started the ignition and stomped on the gas, making me step back, but I was able to swing the bar and take out a taillight before he was gone.

  I got my phone and dialed Lieutenant Tal Heffernan’s number. The detective would probably be asleep, but if he had been looking for the Iturbes, they were now found, and I would be able to track their whereabouts on my MacBook thanks to a GPS program that Roberto had installed. I would ask Heffernan to book them for the assault in Key West, not to mention Gustavo’s injuries, and then sweat them, hard, because I wanted to know who they were working for if they were truly no longer in the employ of the Pimentels. I was thinking that I might return to Coral Gables yet again, to watch the interrogation from behind the mirrored glass. I had questions for them, and I wanted answers.

  I also had a question for Heffernan, although I wasn’t going to ask it, because it was none of my goddamned business, but still…

  How can a police detective not know that his wife has been carrying on with another man for nine years?

  SUNDAY

  Roberto had a fork in one hand and was working at my open MacBook with the other. He hadn’t said a word about the made-from-scratch waffles that I’d served him, topped with fresh strawberries, real maple syrup and whipped cream, because he was preoccupied with trying to hack into Segundo Pimentel’s emails, and so far he hadn’t had any success. His preoccupation might be a good thing, I decided, as today made a full week since he’d last seen his mother, and that had to be weighing on him. It was certainly weighing on me.

  Barbara, Royal, and Susanna had left to go grocery shopping before I’d been awake, and I wished that I’d known—I would have kept them home. Nobody was going anywhere until the Iturbes were found. I’d been up until five AM sending location coordinates to Tal Heffernan, but when they’d finally spotted the van in a vacant lot in Hialeah it was unoccupied. I was angry with myself for not having just held the guy until the cops arrived, but with all that beer in me it had been too risky.

  I’d had a slight hangover that had been tamed with a couple Motrins, but the drugs couldn’t do anything for my guilt. Barbara might not have even noticed that I had been gone, but that was beside the point. The point was that I had sinned, big time, and playing pat-a-cake with Megan’s womanly attributes on a warm Florida night was surely a mortal one, not the lighter, venal kind. Twelve years of Catholic school had drilled that into me. Messing with Megan was a felony, not a misdemeanor, and I was eventually going to have to turn myself in. She and Barbara knew each other, and things like what had taken place out behind Cunningham’s didn’t stay quiet for long, so I would have to get it out in the open if I wanted to have any chance to put my spin on it. And just exactly how I was going to spin it I didn’t know yet, but I was already thinking about borrowing a SWAT vest from Bobby Bove before my wife and I had our little discussion. My three-pitcher hangover was nothing compared to what I knew her wrath would be.

  Sonny Burrows pulled his Subaru into the driveway just as I was cleaning up the breakfast dishes. I met him at the door.

  “Is the Warden home?”

  “She’s out shopping,” I said. “You want some waffles? The griddle’s still warm.”

  “I ate. Just checkin’ on you.”

  “Let me pour you a coffee. I need to practice a confession.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  We adjourned to the back patio, out of Roberto’s earshot. I sat at the glass table and motioned Sonny to a chair. “You ever hear of a woman having an orgasm just because you touched her? Fondled her breasts?”

  He smiled. “All I have to do is walk in the room and they have an orgasm.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Google it, man.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I said. “I fucked up.”

  “So, confess,” he said, taking a sip of his coffee.

  I explained what had taken place the night before, and caught him up on the events of the past few days, including Gustavo’s hospitalization, Megan’s topless paddleboard tour of Blue Cypress Lake, and Segundo Pimentel’s murder. I described my earlier visits to Javier and Segundo Pimentel’s respective offices, and my subsequent meeting the next morning with Chloe Heffernan and her husband. I spilled the beans about the paralegal’s affair with her boss, and told him about the pictures on the tablet computer that Roberto was now working over. I also told Sonny about the braided goon who I had found waiting outside m
y house.

  “Same guys?”

  “Just one of them. The same van. I ran up his insurance bill some, with a crowbar.”

  Sonny smiled. “Hoo boy. I’ll work security for you if you need it.”

  “I need it. I’m going south again, to poke around. I want to talk to the Pimentel brother who’s still alive, if I can find him. He knows more than he’s telling me.”

  “I can stay right here,” Sonny said. “And you can let that thing with the woman slide. Everybody makes those mistakes.”

  “Barbara will find out sooner or later.”

  “Don’t you worry none about Barbara.” He gave me a look that said: There’s more to that, but don’t ask me.

  “Sonny? What are you not telling me?”

  “I just have a problem with your wife sometimes.”

  “I know that. Why?”

  “She rubs me the wrong way, that’s all.”

  “How so?”

  “You’re my friend, man.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And you’re mine. So you can stop bullshitting me.”

  He waited for a long time to speak. “Vince—when you do your work, how do you find out when somebody’s steppin’ out?”

  I put down my coffee a little too hard, and it made a loud noise on the glass top of the table. “The phone bill. I look for texts or the calls at three in the morning. You don’t call your hairdresser at three in the morning.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, nodding.

  “So what are you saying?”

  “Dude’s name is Angelo.” Sonny looked away from me, back toward the house. “He may be full of shit, but he works as a trainer at that club your wife goes to. Says he has a white girlfriend, bragging about it all over Gifford. Says she’s married to an ex-cop.”

  I had nothing to say back, and I felt the blood rush to my face. Barbara was cheating on me? Nine months after giving birth to our son? I had to laugh at what I’d thought about Talbot Heffernan being clueless for so long. This made twice for me—it had happened once with Glory, and now with Barbara.

  “You want me to school him?” Sonny said. “I got two strikes already, but I know a guy.”

  “No. I don’t want you to do anything. Nobody’s getting schooled. I have to think this through. What makes you think he’s not just running his mouth?”

  “Check your phone bill, man.”

  I would, I thought. But not now. If Barbara was having an affair, it would explain some things, but I had way too much going on at the moment to have anything explained. I would just let it fester back there in my mind somewhere, while I did my job and found Roberto’s mother. That was probably not the healthiest course of action, but frankly, I didn’t care. The task at hand was more important than whatever drama my wife might have cooked up.

  And I forgot all about my guilt over getting drunk and fondling Megan Rumsford’s naked breast. That was ancient history now.

  *

  I had decided to take the back route to Coral Gables and was on U.S. 27 nearing Lake Okeechobee from the opposite direction that I had come a couple of days ago. The day had turned out to be partially overcast and was nearly as glum as my mood. Why was it that I could attract a beautiful, younger, single woman, but I couldn’t keep a wife? Sure, that was some guys’ fantasy, but all I can say is try it. It sucks.

  Barbara had hardly reacted when I’d told her that I was leaving again. Maybe she would text her lover boy the gym-dildo, and they would arrange a hasty tryst. Christ on a pogo stick. I was letting this fester, all right. The farther I drove, the more righteous my indignation became, until I had fully and completely absolved myself of any lingering shred of responsibility for what had happened the night before with Megan Rumsford. That was no big deal. Hey, everybody makes those mistakes, like Sonny had said. I could let it slide. In fact, the Warden had just handed me a get-out-of-jail-free card. I could go out and do whatever I damn well pleased with Megan, or any other young babe who was crazy enough to think that a graying, semi-disabled goombata like me was still sexy. Had Megan really said that? It seemed like a dream now—a nice one, not a nightmare, as it had seemed earlier today, before my debriefing with Sonny Burrows.

  My first stop would be at South Miami Hospital where I would consult with Gustavo, my bedridden oracle and clue-dispenser, when he was conscious. Maybe he’d throw me another tidbit, and I had promised Roberto that I would check on him anyway. After that I was going to find Javier Pimentel and put him through the paces, with or without the nut-vise. He had mentioned that he and Gustavo used to fish together, and I wondered if he had a boat. If you were stupid rich in Florida, you owned some kind of boat, whether you used it or not. Before I left Vero I’d called Bobby Bove and had asked him about my hunch, and sure enough there was a Mikelson 70 Sportfisher in the DMV records registered to Pimentel Holdings, LLC, with Javier as the contact person.

  Whoa. A seventy-foot Mikelson wasn’t something that you took out to the Gulf Stream to snag a couple of bonito while you quaffed Miller Lites from a cooler. A sportfishing boat that big was like a five-star hotel, with an Orvis store attached to the stern. The fish didn’t stand a chance, unless the ship’s occupants were too blitzed on champagne to bother to cast a line.

  I also called Tal Heffernan on the way down to ask him if he knew where Javier moored the thing, and if anyone had gone looking for him there. No, and no. I was starting to have my doubts about the Detective Lieutenant. He was a nice guy—nice enough to keep me informed to the point of allowing me to look through his files—but so far he had come up with diddlysquat about the Raimundo Pimentel murder, or the Gustavo mugging, or Lilian’s kidnapping. That, and the fact that he was clueless about his wife, made me wonder if he wasn’t one of those boobs who had somehow climbed the ladder when he should be writing out parking tickets. I’d known a few cops like that, and they just made everything harder for the ones who knew their jobs.

  My phone buzzed, and I pulled over into the parking area of a fried chicken joint to read the text. Roberto.

  The person calls himself Pescador, it said.

  Who?

  The one my uncle was emailing, he wrote back. In Cuba.

  Good work, I wrote. Anything else?

  Yeah, he said. Spreadsheets. But they’re way coded. I’ll keep on it.

  You da man, I texted. Back soon. I’ll be seeing your dad in an hour.

  Tell him I love him, Roberto wrote.

  Damn. I had to sit there by the side of the road for a while to get the lump out of my throat. How could a fifteen-year-old kid deal with all this? It made my own problems seem ludicrously overblown.

  You know what? To hell with my romantic peccadillos. I was back to work now, and I was going to find Lilian Arguelles, and damn soon. Roberto needed his mother, and a week was already way too long.

  *

  Gustavo Arguelles had gotten his color back, but he still couldn’t talk. They had stopped giving him the pentobarbital because his concussion was clearing up, and he looked alert as I entered the hospital room. He couldn’t smile when he saw me, but I could see it in his eyes.

  “Roberto sends his love,” I said. “He’s at my place. He’s doing OK.”

  Gustavo raised his hand and made a writing motion. I saw a clipboard with a pencil attached next to his bed and passed it to him.

  Tell him I love him too, he wrote.

  “I’m looking for Javier,” I said. “He’s gone off somewhere, and the cops don’t know where he is. I found out he has a boat, but I don’t know where he keeps it.”

  Gustavo scribbled on the pad. Key West. Big boat. Mamarta.

  “Mamarta?”

  Is name of boat, he wrote. After his mother.

  “Do you think he might be on it?”

  Don’t know.

  “Did you find out anything about where Lilian might be? Before you were attacked?”

  Maybe Segundo knew, Gustavo wrote. Wouldn’t say. We had a phone call. Said he was working on it.

  “Seg
undo knew? Is that why he was killed?”

  Don’t know.

  “Would his paralegal know where Lilian is?”

  Not sure, he wrote. Segundo kept his secrets.

  “Why would someone kidnap Lilian?” I asked him.

  Money, he wrote.

  “You mean a ransom? You found out about a ransom?”

  No, he wrote. But Pimentels are all about money.

  “Have you ever heard the name Pescador? Somebody in Cuba?”

  No. Pescador means fisherman in Spanish.

  Fisherman? Hmmm. Maybe I was finally on the right track.

  “You take care, Gustavo,” I said. “I’m going back to Key West.”

  *

  Once you’re off the Florida mainland and out on Key Largo, it’s about a hundred miles of the most beautiful scenery imaginable out to Key West via the Overseas Highway. Some of it is no different from the rest of the state, with white stucco condos, trailer parks, and tourist traps, but every few miles you hit a stretch of causeway between the string of islands, and it’s just you and the perfect green-blue of the waters on each side, bordering the Florida Straits. I had the convertible top of the BMW down and was blasting out a Glen Campbell compilation CD loud enough for the rest of the traffic to hear me if their windows were open, but I didn’t care because I was singing “Wichita Lineman” like it was me who had written it, and not Jimmy Webb. There’s something about that stuff that goes right to the deepest, most unknowable part of my soul, which is what music is supposed to do when it’s done right.

  It would have been a perfect drive if I hadn’t managed to get stuck behind an endless continuum of retirees in luxury RVs that looked like glitzed-up Greyhound buses. I would just get rid of one, and then another one would lumber out of nowhere and take its place ahead of me. Theoretically it’s a three-hour trip from Miami to the very end of the highway, but it can be considerably longer if you’re on Grammy-and-Grampy-time.