Lucy's Money: A Lucy Ripken Mystery (The Lucy Ripken Mysteries Book 4)

by J. J. Henderson

  “Hello,” Mickey said.

  “Hey, it’s me. Lucy. In Costa Rica.”

  “Luce. How are you? How’s it going?”

  “OK. I mean, the guidebook work is OK, just about as exciting as you said it would be. I’ll tell you about it when I get out of here. But I’m calling because I don’t want to talk to Harold right now, and I wanted you and everybody to know the money thing’s not working out as well as we’d hoped, so far.”

  “What about those guys Harold said you were talking about? The Four Brothers? He emailed everybody and the consensus was hey, whatever Lucy thinks is right.”

  “Wait a sec, Mick. Let me backtrack a little. I’ve been looking, and all the cool little hotels in Guanacaste that I saw for sale are way too expensive. Even the houses are like half a million bucks if they’re on the beach or have a view. That’s why these guys—the Four Señors, not Brothers—are doing so well. Seems like a lot of people—gringos like us, I mean—want in down here but don’t know where to go or don’t have enough money to do what they want on their own. So there they are, these Señors, totally connected, making up these partnership deals. But Mick, I don’t know. I mean I’m going to see them again tomorrow, but I think they’re into some weird shit.”

  “Like what?”

  She told him Larry’s airplane story, and described the Marcello hotel. When she was done Mickey said, “Well, the contra war was a long time ago, and these guys weren’t the first to take the money and run. As for the hotel, you have to ask yourself if there’s anything they could have done to stop it, or improve it.”

  “Jesus, Mick, you sound so blasé about it all. They could have chosen not to invest in the first place.”

  “Hey, better a Costa Rican investment company with a slightly sleazy past than stock in some American mega-corp scheming to toast the world and lose our money while they’re at it.”

  “If you saw this hotel you might change your tune. Or if you went into Nicaragua like I did. That country’s soul has been fucked, and you can thank the U.S. for that.”

  “I know, I know, it sucks. You’re right. Look, why don’t you go back to these Señor clowns and talk to them? Challenge them. Ask about how they got started, ask to see a more comprehensive list of investments, whatever. Maybe they really have gone legit. If they remain evasive, or even if you just find it too distasteful, hey, I’ll tell the gang we’re gonna bag the whole plan, put the money in pork bellies. Unless you come across some other possibilities.”

  “Right. But bringing the money back may not be so easy—oh, fuck it, you’re right, I shouldn’t get so overwrought about it. I’ve just seen some stuff here that’s really been bugging me.”

  “What stuff?”

  “How about 14-year old street walkers servicing scuzzy American men? I mean this is supposed to be a relatively prosperous place but there’s—God damn, Mickey, there’s some ugly stuff going on here.”

  “Well, we don’t have to have anything to do with that, right?”

  “Of course not. It’s just dispiriting is all. Everything seems to boil down to money. I’ve got it, they don’t. It makes me feel like giving it all away. Hey, listen, I gotta crash. I’ll keep you guys posted, OK?”

  “OK Luce. And hey—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Take it easy. And don’t give our money away, OK? Nothing works out, we’ll figure something out.”

  “Whatever. Damn. I wish you were here, Mick. I could use some company, and Harold’s not—oh, never mind. Well anyways, talk to you later.”

  “See ya Lucy.”

  She hung up, did her ablutions, and went to bed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  GETTING ON THE CASE

  She woke early. After dressing to impress—clean khakis, crisp white shirt, strappy little sandals—Lucy strolled to the offices of the Four Señors. She cased the joint from across the street: same micro-mini’d babe in reception, deadbolts on the doors, sliding security grate outside. No way she could break in on her own, should it come to that.

  A tank-like dark green SUV with tinted windows pulled up. The driver whipped up onto the red-painted curb in front of the office, parked like he owned the sidewalk, and emerged: Alberto Machado, in a raw silk suit, armed with a pricey black briefcase.

  Lucy watched him remote his car alarm into martial mode and strut into the office; then she walked around the block, stopping for an espresso. She strolled into the office at 9:20, twenty minutes late for her appointment.

  She greeted the receptionist and asked if she could hang her coat in the closet. Of course. She did so. The closet looked spacious enough. Lucy hung her jacket up, then turned around. “You can go right in,” reception said. “Señor Machado’s expecting you.”

  “Thanks,” Lucy said. She eyeballed the other offices en route to Machado’s: they were all clean and free of clutter. And of personnel. Where were the other Señors? “Sorry I’m late,” she said, breezing into Machado’s office. “I’m afraid I’ve fallen into operating on Costa Rican time.”

  “And I,” he said with an utterly insincere smile as he rose to greet her, “have fallen into the habit of American time, since so many of my clients are Norteamericanos, and they always show up promptly for appointments. But no problem. I was just getting caught up.” He waved at some papers on his desk, “My father and the other partners are attending a conference in Sao Paulo this week, and so I have too much to do.”

  “Sao Paulo? Sounds interesting.”

  “South America is a minefield these days, but if you’re careful there are some brilliant opportunities.”

  “No doubt.”

  “Sit down,” he said, waving at a chair. “I’m glad you have returned. And I sincerely hope that you have chosen our office to serve your investment needs.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Señor Machado. I’ve heard some stories and I’ve seen some projects, and I wonder if we might discuss them.”

  “Four Señors projects? Of course.” His tone slightly guarded, he shuffled papers. “What for example?”

  “The Marcello Langosta Hotel.”

  He looked crestfallen. “Oh, I’m sorry that you—” then he brightened. “Look, let me show you something.” He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a glossy, full-size, multi-page brochure. He handed it to her. The cover read HOTEL MARCELLO PLAYA LANGOSTA. Beneath the title text lay a color rendering of a contemporary yet tasteful three story hotel sinuously woven into a picturesque bluff, an idealized version of the San Francisco rivermouth. A more site-sensitive project could not be imagined. “This,” he said, “is what we thought we invested in. The designer is—was—Oscar de la Costa, one of the finest architects from Chile. But then—after we had already committed our funds—the developers came back to us and explained that the hotel would have to be bigger in order to meet economic expectations. To make the numbers. Since we of course have to consider first the needs of our investors, we agreed, thinking still that de la Costa would come up with a larger version of this, and so—well, I guess we weren’t as diligent as we might have been. By the time I went down to inspect the project the six stories had been erected, and the contractor had purchased the wrong-sized windows, which meant de la Costa’s plan was practically worthless. In the end, the hotel does not look as we had hoped or dreamed.” He shrugged. “But on the other hand, it is doing very well servicing tour groups from Spain and Canada, and has been a successful investment for our company.”

  Lucy handed the brochure back. “And what of the dam planned for the Pacuare, at Dos Montañas? What is your involvement in that?”

  “That project is run by the ICE, a government agency. The Institute for Costa Rican Electricity. Our investment is strictly to assist that agency in meeting all its financial obligations.”

  “What about the effect on the river, and your country’s environmental heritage?”

  “The country needs the power, Lucy. I can not help that. There is always a trade-off when development comes.”
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br />   “But you know as well as I that the plan is to sell the power to Nicaragua or whoever else will buy it on the open market. So the country does not really need the—”

  “Look, Miss Ripken, if you don’t wish to invest with us then you do not have to. We are a company with a mission, and that is to make money. We respect the laws of the land but our job is to meet the expectations of our investors.”

  “Such as the honorable Mr. Oliver North and friends?”

  “Oliver North? What are you talking about?”

  “Larry Walker told me all about how your company got started, Señor Machado. The CIA, gun-running, drug-dealing, the whole 1980s contra scheme. He said your company—your family!—was right in the middle of it.”

  He kept his cool. “My father and his partners worked very hard to get this company off the ground. In the time of which you speak, there were few opportunities—and one of them was to work with the United States government. We have no regrets about taking part. After all, we—they—were fighting Daniel Ortega and his cronies. You can’t tell me you think that megalomaniacal pedophile was worth defending.”

  “That’s not the point.” But what was the point? The point was she didn’t like doing business this way yet knew no other way. And also that she didn’t quite believe him. It didn’t add up. How could they possibly throw money into a project like the Marcello Langosta and not keep track?

  “Well, whatever is the point,” Machado said, “you should know that your ‘source’ Mr. Larry Walker applied for a loan from us nearly ten years ago, when he and his partner were building their hotel.”

  “Really? And what happened?”

  “We turned him down. Frankly, we never thought such a flake—a pot-smoking, longhaired surf-bum, renowned for chasing prostitutes and getting into fights in bars and on beaches all over Guanacaste—would get it together to make a hotel. But thanks to his partner and her connections, he did. We could have done well investing with him but we played it safe. The point being, of course, that he has some issues with us.”

  “I see.”

  “And perhaps you see also that nothing is ever quite as clear as it seems.”

  “Yes, I know that. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Right. Well, I guess you need to do what you must do, Miss Ripken. I’m sorry that you are so—judgmental—of our company and our business, but that is your privilege. Please let me know if you—when you’ve made a decision. About your money that is.” He gave her a look which said, now get the fuck out of my office. She stared back for a moment, then rose and left him shuffling brochures, pointedly not looking at her.

  As she fetched her coat she did not feel particularly pleased with how the meeting had gone. She’d thought she’d be able to take him down a little, but the guy had an answer for everything. Still, her instincts were good and she sensed that Alberto Machado was loading a raft of bullshit onto her. And would just as soon break her neck as let her walk out the door, if he could get away with it.

  At 5:30 that afternoon, Lucy had nearly wrapped up the guidebook phone work she could do from her hotel room. She dressed in proper tourist garb, headed out from the Britannia, picked up the appropriate tool off the sidewalk by a construction site, then returned to the offices of the Four Señors. When she sensed a serendipitous moment on the street, nobody looking her way, she calmly pulled the brick out of her bag and smashed the windshield of Alberto Machado’s Mercedes. This was a trick she’d learned from Harry in the recent past: sometimes smashing a window, the most obvious sort of distraction, simply works the best. As she walked away to the sound of Machado’s car alarm blaring she tossed the brick into the gutter. She crossed the street a few doors down, and then, screened by a row of parked cars, she casually walked back up the street until she was directly across from the blaring Benz. She watched the receptionist followed by an enraged Machado rush out of the office and over to the car. Lucy crossed the street and dodged into the Four Señors’ reception area. She opened the closet, slipped in, and closed the door. Hidden behind the raincoats, she sat on the floor and began deep-breathing exercises to calm herself in the claustrophobic space.

  A moment later the alarm stopped its rude blaring, and the two of them came back into the office, Machado talking fast and angrily in Spanish. From what Lucy gathered he was trying to blame the receptionist for his car getting smashed. Soon Lucy heard the door to his office slam. All fell quiet, then Lucy heard the receptionist’s heels clicking her way. She opened the closet, took her coat and left.

  A few moments later Machado stomped into reception, barking into a cell phone. Lucy held her breath as he threw open the closet, snatched a coat off a hanger, and slammed the door. A few seconds later Lucy heard him fumbling with keys and locks and sliding security gates into place while snarling non-stop into his cell. Then he was gone. She counted to sixty, then let herself out into the empty office.

  Wasting no time she hurried down the hall to Machado’s office, fishing a small flashlight and a camera out of her bag. She looked quickly through the unlocked drawers in his desk, found nothing but brochures and trivia, then jerked on a locked drawer at bottom right. Locked, but not very securely. It took her just a minute with a hair pin to pick the lock, even though she’d never done it or even seen it done except on television. She shuffled through the hanging files, alphabetical collections of project information, and at the very back, behind the hotels and teak farms and dams and other “legitimate” projects, she found one labeled with the letters BOTBP.

  She pulled it out and had a look. Back Of The Book Projects, the words in English, perhaps to confuse prying local eyes. Interesting. The first was an orphanage on a ranch in the northern region, located on the west bank of the Sarapiqui River north of Puerto Viejo di Sarapiqui. By now she knew her Costa Rican map. From the ranch’s location the Sarapiqui flowed in a wriggly line almost due north to the Nicaraguan border, then entered the San Juan which meandered east into the wildife refuges—swamps, really—of Barra del Colorado and Tortuguero, and on into the Caribbean. The second project was a new hotel going in at a beach called Playa Rajada, southwest of La Cruz near the Nicaraguan border on the Pacific coast. Lucy quickly skimmed the material but saw no smoking guns. The third project was a fishing camp on the beach at Barra del Colorado. She laid various sheets out on the desk, captured images of about two dozen pages of information on the three projects—another bit of trickery recently learned from Señor Harry—then returned the file to the drawer. She left the room as she’d found it.

  Only now she had to figure a way out. The deadbolts would be easy enough except that her presence would be known, mañana, should the bolts be left unlocked. Besides, she’d seen a padlock on the security gate. So the front door was not an option. She’d gambled all along that there had to be a back door somewhere.

  She crept down the hall and sure enough, there it was, solid steel, double dead-bolted with a third lock on the knob. She could get out but she would not be able to re-lock the deadbolts, and it appeared that opening the door might set off an alarm somewhere. Plus she had no idea what the door opened into or onto.

  What the hell, she had no choice. She undid the locks and threw open the door onto a dark little alley—no alarm sounded—and in dim light spotted three boys, 12 year old ragged street urchins all, picking through a dumpster thirty feet away. They looked up, fear in their eyes, but held their ground. “Hey amigos,” Lucy said urgently. They tensed, ready to run. “No, no, is OK,” she said. She waved them over, and gestured into the office. “You go in there, take whatever you want, but be quick and come back out this way, OK?”

  Wide-eyed they looked at one another, then back at her. Then they made their move, leaping out of the dumpster and rushing the door. One grabbed and held it open while the others pushed into the office. Lucy hurried down the alley. At the corner she looked back in time to see one of the boys emerge carrying a pair of sleek table lamps she’d earlier admired in the reception area.


  No way would Alberto Machado know who’d been in there, or why.

  In the morning she called Larry Walker at the Playa Grande hotel. He was in the water but called her back twenty minutes later. “What’s up, Lucy? You should see the waves today. Fucking perfection!”

  “Wish I was there. Hey listen, remember that story you told me about the Four Señors and the Contras and all that?”

  “Yeah, of course. Why? What’s up?”

  “I met with them yesterday. The Señors. This guy there—Alberto Machado—told me you applied for a loan from them and got turned down. What’s with that?”

  “Right, right. But did he tell you why?”

  “Said you were a pothead surfer, renowned for chasing women, and for getting in fights. An entirely disreputable character. Not a good bet for a loan.”

  “Fucking sleaze. That pipsqueak doesn’t know shit. Listen, here’s how it went. First of all, someone had clued them in as to how Oscar—Arias Sanchez, that is—got wind of the airstrip. So they already had it in for us. Then, when the developers started putting in that golf course behind the estuary, Albie and I helped organize the opposition in Tamarindo. We lost that fight, and probably will eventually lose the estuary as a result, but we made some enemies, including the Four Señors, since they were into that project for like a quarter of a million bucks, and already hated us from before. So I went to them for a loan just to fuck with them, really, since I knew they’d turn me down even though we had rights to build the only hotel on Playa Grande, and it was a sure thing if ever there was one in Costa Rica. I was just testing their commitment to their investors. They always crow about how that’s the only thing that matters—making their investors plenty of money—but they wouldn’t come near my project. Buncha vindictive little fuckers who don’t give a shit about Costa Rica, the environment, or anything else except—”

  “Making money.”