Tanzi's Game (Vince Tanzi Book 3)

by C I Dennis

  At nine in the evening we were having a typical night at home for my odd little family: Megan was off somewhere, Gustavo was asleep, Sonny and Susanna were in my study drinking Cointreau from snifters and reading aloud to each other, I had my knitting out to see if I could salvage the aborted sweater, or possible plant-hanger, and Roberto was on the computer, attempting to gain access to the private communications of one of the highest-ranking officials in the Cuban government. It would have made a splendid Norman Rockwell painting.

  “I’m in,” Roberto called from across the room. “This is whacked.”

  I got up from my chair and sat down next to him for a look. “What is that?”

  “It’s her bank account,” he said. “She’s loaded.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty million in this account, and there’s a link to other accounts that I haven’t even seen yet.”

  “What bank?”

  “This one’s in Grand Cayman,” he said, “but there are a couple in Europe that she logs into. She uses the same password for all of them. Typical.”

  “How did you get in?”

  “I sent her a program,” he said. “It looks like a software update. She clicked on it, and it installed itself in the background. It’s new, and the antivirus programs won’t pick it up for a while. I had a guy customize it for me.”

  “So you can see everything on her computer?”

  “Better than that,” Roberto said. He was on his third Coke, and he was wide-eyed from the caffeine. “I can control it like I’m sitting there. It’s my bitch.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “So now you can read all the emails? They aren’t scrambled anymore?”

  “I think so,” he said. “Go get me another Coke.”

  “Get one yourself,” I said. “That computer may be your bitch, but I’m not.”

  *

  Even after it had been unscrambled, the correspondence between Segundo Pimentel and his half-sister in Cuba had been largely unintelligible, at least to Roberto and me. It was a jumbled mix of English and Spanish, as both parties to the emails were equally fluent in both languages. A lot of it was in Legalese, which is a curious tongue that is distinguished by the fact that the few who speak it are permitted to charge $400 an hour to the many who don’t.

  The term fideicomiso kept coming up, as did beneficiario, tenedor, otorgante, fiduciaria, and so on, until we knew that we were out of our depth, however good Roberto’s Spanish was. This was about money, and about somebody’s will, or trust, and most likely about who got what. I was eager to know the details, because I had a suspicion that the knowledge would eventually lead me to Lilian.

  Some of their correspondence had been in English, and the meaning was considerably more obvious:

  Maria: You screw me on this and you’re dead.

  Segundo: You push us too hard and I’ll blow you sky high. I don’t care who you are.

  And later, an exchange between them that was dated the day after Lilian Arguelles’ disappearance:

  Segundo: Take me instead, you fucking putona. She has nothing to do with this.

  Maria: You have one on the bar now, brother. Pay up or lose.

  “One on the bar?” I asked Roberto.

  “It’s a backgammon term,” he said. “That’s when your opponent lands on your unprotected piece, and it gets taken all the way to the beginning, and off the board. You have to roll the right number to get back on the board, and you hope that the spaces aren’t blocked. The piece is sort of a captive—like my mother.”

  “You should teach me how to play,” I said. “Are you good at it?”

  “My mom taught me. She can kick anyone’s ass.”

  “I’ve been getting my ass kicked all day,” I said. “Now I’m going to bed.”

  *

  It was that damn dream again. This time, I at least knew that I was in a bed—the single futon mattress that I had taken out of storage and had set up on the floor of Royal’s abandoned nursery where Barbara’s cot had been. This was not the cold stone slab of the other dreams. But I still couldn’t move.

  The same hands touched me. They started at my sides, and then moved to my chest and massaged my nipples between their fingertips. The hands moved down my torso to my groin, found a grip, and began to stroke.

  No…not now…too tired…

  Shhh, a voice said. Barbara? Had she come home?

  I want you, Vince, the voice said. You have no idea how much.

  The stroking was having an effect, but I couldn’t wake up. I didn’t want to. Everything was too complicated. And I hadn’t been touched like this in months.

  She was going crazy on top of me, and the room was spinning. Too much had happened to me in too little time, and my head hurt where the bullet had entered, which was never good because everything would suddenly go bright white like the angels were coming for me, but I wasn’t ready to go, because people needed me here—

  OH GOD, the voice was now screaming, and I had suddenly gone from ninety percent asleep to ninety percent awake and was sliding off the edge of unconsciousness into a free fall of realization that ended with a shock:

  This was no dream.

  Which would have been fine if it had been Barbara. Make-up sex was always the best.

  But I was fully awake now, and I had just made love—or something—to Megan Rumsford, who lay naked on the bed next to me and was gasping for breath.

  SATURDAY

  I had gotten good and drunk one night in my freshman year of college and had found myself in bed with a girl the next morning. I didn’t know what her name was, or what dorm we were in, or even what she looked like. She slept facing away from me, and her sandy blonde hair was all that I could see—just a section of it that wasn’t covered by her bedcovers—and I lay there, mortified, hung over, and not knowing what to do. Finally, I got up as quietly as I could, dressed, and left. For the rest of my one-and-only year as a college student, I would pass by some girl with sandy blonde hair on the campus—there were a lot of them—and I would feel sick to my stomach. That was by far the worst experience that I had had with a woman, and I swore that I would never do anything that stupid again, ever. And I hadn’t.

  Until last night.

  Megan had left the room before I awoke, and I tried to reconstruct what had happened. Had I really been awake? Or was I asleep, and defenseless, and I’d had no idea what was going on, and Barbara wouldn’t kill me when she found out, because the whole thing was not my fault?

  Nope.

  I had been awake. Not at first, but there had been a time when I could have stopped the proceedings, although we were way into it by then. A time when I was aware that it wasn’t my wife who was on top of me. But I hadn’t stopped it.

  And, why not? Was I retaliating against Barbara for her affair? That would be childish, although I’m not immune to being childish. Was I actually attracted to Megan? Hell yes, she was attractive. But that still didn’t explain it.

  I felt like some primal instinct had taken over, and I had allowed it to. Oh yes, I’d heard every variation of that one when I was a cop. It was nature. Men and women just did this. You can’t fight these urges. In fact, you shouldn’t—it’s not healthy to bottle up your sexuality.

  Tell that to a rape victim.

  I was totally disgusted with myself, and I wished that I were still a practicing Catholic because I could hightail it to confession and do my penance, but I had never truly bought into that whole scene, not even as a kid. Sin was sin, and it might temporarily lighten my load to confess it to a priest, but that didn’t mean that I hadn’t done it, or that I wouldn’t ultimately pay the price. Instead, I got up off of the futon, entered the bathroom, and turned on the shower. And I would need more than one shower, again, because the stink on my conscience was even worse than the one on my clothes had been, the day before.

  *

  I was carefully removing a rack of just-baked popovers out of the oven with my mitts when Gustavo shuffled out
of the bedroom in his bathrobe and took a stool at the counter next to Roberto, Sonny, and Susanna. “That smell,” he said as loud as he could, which was a whisper. “It sucked me in here like Looney Tunes.”

  “You mean like where the smoke drifts, and Daffy Duck floats off the ground, back to the food?” Sonny asked.

  “‘Zactly,” Gustavo slurred.

  “My man Vince makes some dope-ass popovers,” Sonny said. “So Gustavo, you can eat all the good shit now?”

  “Language, Sonny,” Susanna said, frowning.

  “I’m going to try,” Gustavo said.

  “I’ll scoop out the middle and cut it up,” I said. “That’s how I feed them to Royal.”

  “Sorry, Vince,” Gustavo said.

  “No trouble,” I said. “I enjoy doing it. I miss my little boy.”

  No one said anything, but I had instantly changed the mood in the room.

  “Vince, man,” Sonny finally said. “You got too much on your mind. We should all go fishing.”

  “Nobody’s going fishing,” Roberto said, looking up from his computer. “We have work to do.” He turned to his father. “Dad, Vince and I have a few questions, if you’re up for it. After we eat, maybe?”

  “I’m up for it,” Gustavo whispered, and I saw the look of pride on his face as his fifteen-year-old son stepped up and took control. Roberto was becoming a man, because all of a sudden his parents needed him to. He was in the process of leaving his innocence behind like a molted snakeskin, and it was beautiful to watch. Some kids never grew up, because they had never been tested. This was Roberto’s test.

  We finished our breakfast without much further conversation. After a while Sonny said, “You guys go out back and talk. Me and Susanna got the dishes.”

  “Susanna and I,” she corrected.

  “Hoo boy,” he said. “What I meant to say was Susanna got the dishes.” He winked at me. “I’m going fishing.”

  *

  Lilian Arguelles had intended to disclaim her portion of the trust, according to Gustavo. Roberto, his father, and I were gathered around the glass-and-aluminum patio table out under the back awning that we had chosen as a place to talk. The morning was still, and was quiet enough for us to hear Gustavo’s faint words. “She called it blood money,” he told us. “People in Cuba died because of it, and neither of us wanted any part of that. We both have good jobs. We don’t need anything else.”

  Gustavo said that Segundo was the one who kept track of everything, and all that he knew was that a separate trust had been set up by Fulgencio Batista for each of his nine children from the estimated two hundred million dollars that he had left Cuba with after he had been ousted in 1959. Plus interest. Gustavo had no idea what the numbers looked like now, but he said that Raimundo Pimentel had been entitled to the income from his wife’s trust after she had died, and when he was gone the principal was to be split equally among Maria Marta Pimentel’s children, including Maria Inés. Since Lilian had planned to opt out, that meant that the money would be divided four ways between Javier, Susanna, Segundo, and Maria Inés.

  Ah, yes—good old money. The family real estate business was in deep trouble, and sixty million that I knew about was owed to Maria Inés Calderón, who could send out navy ships to pick up coolers full of Ben Franklins, and could kidnap her own half-sister seemingly at will. Throw in Segundo Pimentel’s backgammon wagering disasters, and you suddenly had a motive: kill off the old man, distribute the trust, and everybody was flush again. Habemus pecuniam.

  “Could Segundo have killed his father?” I asked Gustavo. “Or had him killed?”

  He took a long sip from the straw of his water cup and put it back down on the glass table. “We used to fish together,” he whispered. “You get to know someone when you go fishing with them. I would say no, but he hated the old man. They all did.”

  “Why?”

  “Long story,” he said.

  “Take your time,” I said.

  “They were in Vermont,” Gustavo whispered, and Roberto and I had to lean close to him in order to hear. “Up where you come from. A January ski trip, with all the kids. Lilian was like, eleven or something. Raimundo and Maria Marta had a fight, and they had rented a house way out in the woods, and he threw her out in the middle of dinner and locked the door. The temperature was below zero, and she didn’t have her coat on. The kids were all crying, but he wouldn’t let her back in, and she walked three miles in her slippers to a gas station and then collapsed. She was in the hospital for two weeks with pneumonia, and she was never the same after that. She was sick all the time, until she died.”

  Roberto looked at me, and then back at his father. “So if Segundo killed his father for the money, then who killed Segundo?”

  “I don’t know,” Gustavo said. “I’ve been thinking about it. I thought it might be your aunt, Maria Inés, but that would make it more difficult for her to collect what you said they owed her. She’s capable of killing somebody though, or having it done. She has her grandfather Fulgencio’s genes.”

  “Why did they even let her back into Cuba?” I asked him.

  “She’s like the return of the prodigal daughter,” he said. “A Batista granddaughter who rejected capitalism and came back to Cuba. She lives in a small house, and she drives a beat-up old Lada. She’s a folk hero. But Segundo told me that she’s probably the wealthiest woman on the island.”

  “Not for long,” Roberto said, looking up from his open laptop.

  “What?” Gustavo and I said at the same time.

  The young man closed the lid of the computer. “I just transferred a hundred thousand dollars out of her Cayman account,” He said. “That’s the limit without a voice print.”

  “Transferred to where?” I asked him.

  “Planned Parenthood,” Roberto said. “It’s my mom’s favorite charity. My aunt probably won’t see it for a while, unless she’s really paying attention. I just wanted to make sure that I could do it.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Later,” Roberto said. “Let’s go inside and see if Sonny can fly us to the Keys.”

  *

  Bobby Bove called while Susanna and I were putting away the last few dishes. That’s a task that the owner of the house needs to be involved in, or your guests will find new and creative places to put away your strainer or your carrot peeler so that you will never, ever find them again. I dried off my hands and picked up the phone.

  “You getting anywhere with that key fob?” Bobby asked.

  “Yes. You’ll never guess what this is about.”

  “I’ve been a cop for thirty-four years,” he said. “So it’s either sex or money, and I’ll take money.”

  “You got it,” I said. “There’s a trust, set up by the grandfather. Blood money from Cuba. Now that Raimundo is dead, it gets divided.”

  “How much are we talking about?”

  “Millions. Maybe a lot of millions. The grandfather was Fulgencio Batista.”

  “The dictator? No shit?”

  “I’m wondering if Segundo killed his father. He was in the hole for a lot of money. It looks like he owed it to the half-sister in Cuba, and she’s a cutthroat.”

  “Didn’t happen,” Bobby Bove said. “I forgot to mention that the divers found a shell casing in the water yesterday. Segundo got killed by a single shot from a Walther PPK. The shell was a .32 caliber, and the hammer mark was from a Walther.”

  “That’s what James Bond carried.”

  “Yeah, whoever shot Segundo must think he’s some kind of cool guy. It’s a decent concealed carry weapon, but it’s pretty heavy.”

  “So why couldn’t Segundo have shot Raimundo?”

  “Because the father was shot with the same gun,” Bove said. “And Segundo didn’t shoot himself. He was hit from too far away, and we would have found the weapon. You see anybody with a Walther, you let me know. We’re talking the same shooter for both jobs.”

  “Has anybody seen Javier?”

>   “I just got off the phone with Heffernan. He has people at the house, and the Key West cops are watching the boat. But no, Javier’s disappeared, and so have those two gangbangers.”

  “I wonder how Javier would feel if I borrowed his boat for a while?”

  “What? How are you going to get inside? Or start it? It’s gotta be locked up tight.”

  “I know a guy who does locks,” I said. “At least I used to.”

  *

  By the time Sonny landed the Piper at the Key West International Airport I felt like my whole body had been twisted into a buñuelo. Sleeping on the futon in Royal’s room had been better than my hay bale bed of the night before, but my little after-hours session with Megan had been the wrong kind of therapy, and I was knotted up into a figure eight, both physically and emotionally. Guilt will do that to you.

  I’d had some time during the trip to think about it all, and I had decided to stop torturing myself. Barbara had had an affair, and so had I, although mine had been a semi-somnolent one. So we had both screwed up, and it wasn’t the end of the world. Couples could get professional help, like I’d encouraged Rose to do for the trauma that she’d been through. Just like cops heard the same things from people all the time, so did therapists, and the best ones could cut to the chase. I knew that counseling worked because I’d seen it with many of the estranged couples I had dealt with as a private investigator: my snooping would expose the problem, everything would go to hell for a while, and then a good counselor would jump in and would help the couple resolve it, assuming that they wanted to preserve the relationship.