Tanzi's Game (Vince Tanzi Book 3)

by C I Dennis

  “Come with me,” she said. “She’s not here. I’ll get it for you.”

  She led me into the building, which had gone semi-dark as the lights were out. These people took their lunchtime seriously. We climbed the polished marble stairs, and the young woman led me into the waiting area. “Stay here,” she said. “I’ll find it.”

  I knew that she wouldn’t, but I did what I had been asked to, and she came back out after a few minutes. “It’s not there, sir. Sorry.”

  “Please let me look,” I said.

  “You can look, but be fast,” she said. “I shouldn’t be doing this, but I’ve lost my phone before and they’re, like, totally expensive.”

  “You’re a doll,” I said. I crossed the floor of the office and plucked my cellphone from the folds of the visitor’s chair.

  “I really didn’t see that,” she said. “I looked there.”

  “No problem,” I said, and she led me back down the stairs and out the door that we had entered from. No problem at all.

  Your boss is the one who’s going to be having a problem.

  *

  Visitors were supposed to be captivated by Cuba: it was a place to hear some great music, enjoy the local cuisine, relax on the beaches, and get away from all of the numbing sameness that you found in the States. But this was hardly a vacation—it was an assignment, and the only captives were Lilian Arguelles and now Rose DiNapoli. I had returned to the convent and was worried sick. Despite Robert Patton’s tirade I wondered if the consular staff could actually do anything—they had seemed so sure that they couldn’t. There wasn’t much to do except wait, which I was doing in the courtyard, hoping that Rose would come through the door at any moment.

  The only positive was that I had made some real progress in my investigation. The task that Roberto had set for me was complete. Also, I knew for certain that Lilian Arguelles was being held as some kind of collateral—for a debt of sixty million dollars that was due by the end of the weekend, according to the Minister of Finance, and soon to be vice president. Due to whom? To the government of Cuba, of which Maria Inés Calderón was a high-ranking official? Or was this one off the books, and it was a debt owed directly to her? Either way it was a lot of money, especially if the Pimentels were as broke as Talbot Heffernan had determined that they were from Segundo Pimentel’s financial records. The cooler that Javier had dropped off of the stern of his boat the other day would only hold a down payment, if it had indeed been packed with hundred-dollar bills. That would be nowhere near sixty million.

  I would have to lean on Heffernan some more to do some better forensic accounting and see if he could trace anything to Cuba, or to Ms. Calderón. He had said that they owed some bankers in the Cayman Islands, but that could easily be a front for Cuban interests. The money people in the Caymans were notoriously unconcerned about those things as long as they got their cut.

  It was three in the afternoon now. I would have to leave within the hour if I was going to make it to the airport in time for my deportation. I had already packed, and was now pacing the halls of the convent, planning my next moves to keep my mind off of my worries about my friend the ICE agent. I would drive to Vero as soon as I got back and would deliver my cellphone to Roberto, who would hopefully work some magic. I’d check in with Bobby Bove and Tal Heffernan and would share what I knew. This thing had now gone way beyond some private eye looking for a missing woman, and any resources that they could add might help. I would contact Robert Patton and see if he could bring in the cavalry: if Lilian Arguelles, a U.S. citizen, had been kidnapped and was being held in a foreign country, that should be something that would get some serious attention, and Patton was the right person to make that happen.

  And I would find Javier Pimentel, and we would have a little talk. No—we would have a big talk. I didn’t think that I was going to have to lean on him very hard; I already knew about his financial condition, his massive debt, and the fact that his sister had been held hostage for nearly two weeks. Assuming that the guy wasn’t a complete psychopath, he had to be feeling the pressure, and I would now have some leverage to make him tell me everything that he knew, and to possibly help him get out of this mess. I just hoped that he was still alive, because the Pimentel family survival rate hadn’t been all that impressive lately.

  I also needed to check in on my refugee camp. I wondered what I would find there, and if Barbara and Royal might have returned during my absence. I badly wanted to see Royal, although I wasn’t as enthusiastic about seeing my wife. We had a lot of heavy lifting to do, and I knew that it was important, but—

  Rose DiNapoli staggered through the convent door and nearly fell at my feet. When I rushed to her side and picked her up, she collapsed into my arms and began to cry.

  “Are you all right?” I asked her, as I held her as tightly as I could.

  “No,” she managed to say between sobs. “Don’t let go of me.”

  The agent’s hair was a tangled mess, and her clothes looked like she’d been dragged through the streets behind a bus. We stayed like that for several minutes while her breathing slowly returned to normal, and she finally looked up at me. Her makeup had run down her face in black streaks, and her eyes were swollen and red. “Those bastards,” she said. “They’ll never let me come back here now. Which is lucky for them, because I’d kill them.”

  “What happened?” I said. She had stopped crying but was still shivering in my arms.

  “I—can hardly talk about it.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “They did some shit to me too.”

  “Oh yeah? Four of them?” Her voice had become a thin shriek. “Four guys stripping you, and you’re naked, and they handcuff you to a table—”

  “They raped you?”

  She stepped away from me and looked around the tables until she found a plastic bottle of water, which she held to her lips and drained.

  “Sorry, Vince. I just—”

  “Did they rape you?”

  “Nobody took their pants off,” she said. “But yes, they raped me.”

  “I have a flight to Cancun at five. We’ll get you a seat.”

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” she said. “I hate this place.”

  *

  To get to Miami via Cancun you begin by flying in the opposite direction, to Mexico, and then you retrace your path, flying almost directly over Cuba again to reach Florida. It makes no sense at all, but the only direct flights were the sanctioned charters, and we had already ditched our little group of nuns. I was looking forward to being home and getting rid of my clergy shirt, which chafed at my neck and fit me about as well as a size-six Speedo on a sumo wrestler.

  Rose had spent the first leg of the trip alternating between shivering and retching with dry heaves into an airsickness bag. A few minutes into the Cancun-to-Miami flight she fell asleep, and her head lolled into my lap. A flight attendant draped a blanket over her, and now and then she would make a snorkeling noise, but otherwise she stayed silent while I read an article about the origin of Bermuda shorts in the in-flight magazine. Honestly, how did they come up with that stuff? The inanity of the reading material was in stark contrast to the seriousness of the case that I was now deeply involved in, and which included yet another casualty—the sleeping ICE agent with her head on my thigh. We had kidnapping, murder, and now rape. The felonies were piling up, and the source of it all appeared to be a middle-aged politician with sun-damaged skin and six-hundred-dollar shoes.

  Rose was definitely in shock, and I hadn’t had the heart to ask any further questions about what the Cuban police had done to her. Save that for the therapist. I presumed that the Customs Bureau had people who could provide those services when things got unbearable for their employees, just like we’d had when I was at the Sheriff’s Department. Most cops retired after twenty or thirty years, but if they always held the bad stuff in, they would never make it that long. It’s part of the job, and you kind of get used to it, but not really. Remember
that, the next time a deputy pulls you over—he or she may have just scraped some unlucky soul off of the pavement, or worse, so don’t get too worked up about your lousy speeding ticket.

  We landed in Miami at ten thirty, and I offered Rose a ride, but her car was in the garage, and she said no. Her fiancé would be at her house, she said, and it wasn’t a long drive to Fort Lauderdale where she lived. She had regained her color. I walked her to where her car was parked and held out my hand, which felt a little silly seeing how she’d had her face in my crotch for the past hour.

  “I’d give you a hug, Vince, but I don’t feel like touching anybody.”

  “Does ICE provide counseling? Someone you can talk to?”

  “I keep my own counsel,” she said.

  “Not this time, Rose. That’s not healthy.”

  “You go on along,” she said. “I wish I could say I enjoyed it.”

  “Call you tomorrow,” I said, and she got into her car and drove away.

  I found the BMW and put the top down. It was still in the eighties, and I needed some fresh air to keep me going. Tomorrow would be a school day for Roberto, but things could no longer wait, so I would wake him up when I got home so that we could work. He would have to miss school for a day or two. The situation was suddenly about twice as bad as I had thought it was, which meant that I would need to work twice as hard, and get half as much sleep.

  THURSDAY

  Roberto had my phone plugged into his laptop and was sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter. There was nothing that I could do to help him, so I got out my knitting and sat in my recliner. My sister’s sweater was looking less like a piece of clothing and more like some kind of bizarre woolen plant hanger, and I was about ready to chuck the whole goddamn thing in the trash. Knitting used to be good for helping me relax, but at two in the morning there was no relaxing; there was only fatigue, and anticipation, but so far Roberto hadn’t said a peep.

  I liked to watch him work—his fingers would dash around in a blur, and he would have several windows open at once, one of which was a chat portal that connected him to his hacker buddies. They all helped each other, and I didn’t see a lot of difference between them and the fraternity of stonecutters that my father had hung out with at the Knights of Columbus in Barre, except that the stonecutters had probably never broken into some theoretically secure website just for the sheer hell of it. They were too busy downing Budweisers and coughing up granite dust.

  I had taken inventory when I’d entered the house: no Barbara or Royal, Roberto was in the study, and I assumed that Susanna was in the spare room, as her purse was in the kitchen. Megan Rumsford’s car was parked outside, and I didn’t dare peek into my room but I figured that she was in there. No sign of Sonny, but he might have gone out, although the hour was late.

  I interrupted my young friend. “Getting anywhere?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But I need to generate a soft token code. I think Pescador has the program on his computer, but I can’t find it.”

  “Pescador is a she, by the way. Her name is Maria Calderón. She’s the Minister of Finance.”

  “Nice,” he said. “How’d you get to her computer?”

  “I can’t share my methods. Not unless you want to teach me how to hack.”

  “You’re way too old for that,” Roberto said. He was right—I could open a lock, but this would be like learning Chinese. You needed a young brain, and preferably one that hadn’t already taken a bullet.

  “So tell me how this works again?”

  “The thing you plugged into her CPU was a keystroke logger. It sent the info by Bluetooth to an app on your phone. After you emailed me I sent her a message using my Uncle Segundo’s account so that she’d read it, and then I’d have her logon information, because it would be relayed to your phone. I told her I was Javier, using Segundo’s email program.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  Roberto blushed. “I was trying to stir her up. I thought she was a guy. I needed to get a reaction, or I wouldn’t get the logon.”

  “So, you said…?”

  “I called her a pinguero. It’s not in the dictionary. It means a male prostitute.”

  I had just taken a sip of water and nearly spit it out. “So what did she write back?”

  “Something not very nice. But it worked. And now some of my friends are all over the soft token thing. We might have it by the morning.”

  “I’ll stick around until you do.”

  “You should go to bed, Vince. You look really tired.”

  “Is Megan in my room?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I have nowhere to sleep,” I said.

  “You could hit the couch.”

  “But Sonny will be back, right?”

  “He’s upstairs with my aunt,” Roberto said. “He moved his stuff up there last night.”

  Oh really? Hoo boy.

  Tanzi’s Tip #8: Cupid may look like a fat little baby, but he’s one hell of a good shot.

  *

  We had stayed up until five AM and still no luck on the codes, so I took the couch and Roberto flopped into the pullout bed in my study. It dawned on me just before bedding down that I could take the cot in Royal’s room, but when I opened the door it was gone, as was his folding crib. Huh? The bureau remained, along with a couple hundred stuffed animals, but the rest of the baby furniture was missing. Even the diaper pail had been taken. I didn’t have the energy to ponder that one.

  Three hours later I woke, showered, shaved, and lumbered into the kitchen looking for coffee. Susanna had already made a pot, and she handed me a steaming mug.

  “Everything going OK?” I asked her.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “Sonny went out to run some errands.” She was wearing that unmistakable just-got-lucky smile that people wear when they have a new flame and can hardly leave the bed. I was glad for her, and for Sonny, too. I knew nothing about his love life except that he didn’t have anyone steady, and Susanna was a catch.

  “What happened to the baby furniture?” I asked.

  “Oh,” she said, and the smile evaporated. “Your wife came over yesterday with a friend.”

  “A friend?”

  “He had a pickup truck. She didn’t say anything to you?”

  No, she didn’t. I sipped my coffee and began to smolder. The “friend” had to be the Angelo guy? Jesus W.T.F. Christ. Barbara comes over to the house and starts hauling away the furniture? What kind of bogus move was that? I had been thinking while I was shaving that maybe she and I should be going to counseling, but right now I felt like finding her new boyfriend and counseling him with the butt of my Glock.

  “When did this happen?”

  “She got most of her clothes on Tuesday night,” Susanna Pimentel said. “They came back for the other stuff yesterday. Vince, I’m so sorry. I thought you knew.”

  “It’s not your problem,” I said.

  Tuesday night? That was when I had a wicked buzz going, and had gotten fresh with Rose DiNapoli while strolling on the Malecón. And, oh yes—last Saturday night I’d had my hand up my therapist’s shirt in a darkened parking lot out behind a pool hall. And that was after going topless paddle boarding with her on the previous afternoon. So now I was freaking out about my wife’s possible infidelities? One thing that I had learned over the years of my P.I. career: it was never just one person who was responsible for the problems in a relationship. Love takes effort, and if you sit around and lay blame, you’re only making excuses for your own bad behavior.

  I spent the next hour on the phone catching up with the various authorities. Bobby Bove listened attentively but didn’t have anything new to tell me. The Sheriff’s Department had decided that the Segundo Pimentel murder was definitely a hit, and they’d pulled most of their resources from the investigation. Talbot Heffernan said that the Feds had made no progress on the Raimundo Pimentel shooting either, and had also called it a pro job. The one useful piece of information that Heffernan had wa
s that Javier Pimentel was back in town, although the Iturbe brothers hadn’t been seen. Neither of the two cops had found out any more about Lilian’s kidnapping, and both of them were shocked when they learned that I’d been to Cuba and was pretty certain that she was there. I briefed them on my meeting with Maria Inés Calderón, including her reference to the sixty million that she expected to collect from the Pimentels.

  What I didn’t tell them about was Roberto’s and my electronic snooping. I have always tried to keep Roberto insulated from these things as much as I could. If we found something out, and I believed that Heffernan, or Bove, or Robert Patton could use it, I would pass it on. For now it wasn’t necessary seeing how Roberto and his friends still hadn’t managed to get access.

  Robert Patton wasn’t answering the phone, and neither was Rose DiNapoli. I hoped that she was still asleep. She had had a horrible experience, and, with apologies to the male half of the planet for generalizing, I have to say that I don’t believe that a man can really understand what a woman goes through when she is raped, groped, or whatever madness had happened to Rose. No matter the degree, it’s all bad, and it is difficult for a man to truly understand what it’s like to be victimized like that. I had seen it countless times as a deputy, and for many of the women there was no “recovery”. They had lost something, and they weren’t ever going to get it back.

  Megan Rumsford came out of the bedroom—my bedroom—and took a seat at the kitchen counter. “When did you get home?” she asked me.

  “Late.”

  “I didn’t mean to take your bed,” she said. “I thought you were going to be there longer.”

  “So did I,” I said. She was wearing another of my shirts: a threadbare Red Sox jersey that barely covered her behind.

  “Did you make any progress?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Roberto and I are working on some things.”

  “Vince, did you notice that Barbara—”

  “Stole my furniture? Yeah.”

  “I told her not to do it,” Megan said.

  “Where did she go? Back to her sister’s?”