The Night Cafe

by Taylor Smith

  “And such a person lives here?”

  “I have a report that a subject of interest may be here at the moment, yes. A man named Moises Gladding.”

  Peña nodded. “Ah, sí. Señor Gladding has a villa a few kilometers south of the town. I was not aware that this was his line of business, however.”

  “Not normally perhaps, but I’m following up on intelligence that suggests—”

  Teagarden was interrupted by the banging open of Peña’s office door. A young policeman had rushed in, yammering in Spanish too rapid for Teagarden to follow. He did, however, clearly hear the name Gladding.

  Captain Peña got to his feet and reached for his hat. “Señor Teagarden, your timing is good. It seems we have had a report of an incident at the villa of Señor Gladding.”

  “An incident?”

  “Someone has reported hearing gunshots. Come. We will go and investigate.”

  It had seemed fortuitous to Teagarden at the time, his being with the good captain at that precise moment. Now, however, facing imminent and certain demise on this wild ride along a dangerous road, he could only regret his lucky timing.

  Twelve

  It seemed like a good time to lie low. Hannah parked the gardener’s battered pickup on a side street in old town Puerto Vallarta, then made her way with her backpack and the portfolio to the Malecón, losing the gardener’s battered straw hat along the way.

  A couple of blocks from The Blue Gecko, she came upon a down-at-heels hotel, the kind of place frequented by shoestring tourists and couples on one-hour dates. The lobby of the Hotel Tropical was about as appealing as its mildewed pink exterior. The floor might have been pretty once, covered in an Aztec-inspired pattern of bright tiles, but the grout was black and dozens of tiles were chipped or missing. The potted trees were all on life support. Rattan chairs and a couple of settees covered in threadbare chintz had also seen better days.

  The clerk at reception was engrossed in a telenovela playing out loudly on a small television perched on the desk. His pressed white shirt was embroidered with the name of the hotel, and he wore a name tag that identified him as Miguel. He didn’t look up from his soap opera until Hannah finally brought her hand down on the bell by his ear, and then he jumped.

  “Ah, señora, bienvenidos.”

  “I’d like a room, please.”

  “Certainly.” He pulled an old leather-bound register from under the desk. “How many nights?”

  “Just one.”

  He opened the register and turned it around to face her. “Please sign here.”

  While he examined the pegboard key holder behind him, Hannah studied the register, amused by the number of Smiths and Garcias who’d checked into the place. There was even a Homer Simpson. Clearly, they weren’t sticky about pesky things like identification.

  “Maria Lopez,” she wrote. Why not? The Mediterranean dark eyes and hair of her Greek heritage were a kind of ethnic pass key, marking her as a probable native in any number of milieus. It was a useful thing, allowing her to fly under the radar in places where blond women traveling alone became easy targets for obnoxious attention.

  Up the stairs and down a short hall, the door to Room 9 creaked open when she turned the key. The place seemed clean enough, but musty, with a faint smell of mildew and stale cigarette smoke. The wallpaper, curling in places, was a decidedly uncheery brindle-brown imprinted with dark ivy—no doubt very fashionable in its day, but a dumb decor idea in a seafront town. They should have stuck with paint. The room was narrow, with a scarred pine dresser against one wall and a single bed opposite. The bed was covered with a multicolored striped blanket tucked in neatly beneath the mattress and smoothed over a flat-looking pillow. The red curtains had seen better days, but at least they covered the long windows that overlooked the busy street below.

  She peered out at the tourists strolling along the boardwalk. In the near dark of early evening, cheerful lights were illuminated, strung like festive garland across shops, restaurants and pretty courtyards. She opened the window. If she angled just right, she could see the dead gardener’s pickup where she’d left it parked in the street. On the outdoor patio of a café across the way, a mariachi band was serenading a young American family, whose two little children clapped their hands gleefully. Smoke rose from a brazier in back of the restaurant and something smelled delicious.

  Hannah leaned her forehead against the glass and sighed as she watched the laughing kids. What a day. She was tired, she was hungry, and she wanted to hug her son. She yawned, then yawned again.

  A fugitive in Mexico. Great. Just freakin’ great.

  She stretched out on the bed and was asleep in a nanosecond.

  It had been a long time since William Teagarden had worked a murder scene. He’d begun his police career as a London constable, encountering plenty of street crime, a few murders and plenty of death by mishap. But it was only when he’d transferred to Scotland Yard that he’d really learned to discern the subtleties of a homicide scene. If he’d left death behind when he’d joined the Art and Antiquities Unit, his eye for detail had been honed to an even sharper degree by fine details of the stolen masterpieces he tracked.

  He followed Captain Peña around the blood-spattered villa, every turn seeming to uncover yet another horror. The soft soil in the garden showed the imprints of several pairs of shoes—trainers, Teagarden decided, in various large sizes that didn’t match up with the feet of any of the victims. There was one smaller set of boot prints, too. Nowhere did the boot prints overlap those of the athletic shoes, nor vice versa, making it impossible to know if this person had been on the scene before, during, or after the time those larger prints had been left. Could that possibly be a coincidence? Or had the fellow in the small-sized boots wanted to confuse the appearance of things?

  Teagarden followed Peña into the kitchen, where the captain crouched on the ground to examine the murdered cook. Teagarden, however, was distracted by the oven.

  “Do you have an extra pair of those latex gloves?” he asked.

  The captain dug in his pocket and fished out a pair, tossing them across the room. Teagarden slipped them on and opened the oven door. The interior was still quite hot, the two loaves of bread on the rack burned to a crisp.

  Why would the cook turn off the oven and then leave the bread inside to dry out and then burn? She’d fallen at the open refrigerator. It made no sense to Teagarden that she would have shut off the oven and then walked away. She would get the bread out first. No cook would take the time and effort to bake homemade bread and then just abandon it to burn. Even if she’d somehow forgotten and it had burned by accident, why not remove it as soon as she realized her mistake?

  No, the timeline was wrong. Peña said the anonymous caller had reported hearing a series of shots fired around five o’clock. And the woman had been dead for about an hour, by the sedimentation rate evident in the bloodstains. The bread had still been baking when she was killed.

  So the killer—killers, Teagarden amended, remembering the multiple sets of shoe prints—shot the cook and walked away, leaving the bread in the oven to burn to charcoal. But then, maybe in the last ten minutes or so, someone had turned off the oven.

  “Did any of your officers come into the kitchen before us?” Teagarden asked.

  Peña cocked a thumb at a young patrolman standing by the kitchen door. “Only Sanchez. Why?”

  “We were right behind him. I didn’t see him turn off this oven, did you?”

  Peña shook his head, then asked Sanchez the same question in Spanish. Sanchez said no.

  So who? Teagarden wondered.

  Peña grunted as he got to his feet. He and Teagarden went out the back door and across the patio to the pool area, where two more bodies had been found. The woman floating facedown had, like the others, been shot twice. The Asian male—now who was he? Teagarden puzzled—had taken a shot in the back. That first shot hadn’t killed him. A trail of blood on the ground and grass stains on the knees o
f his pants suggested he’d tried to crawl away, then turned to defend himself, only to be executed by a bullet between the eyes. His body lay faceup on the lawn, a nine-millimeter semiautomatic next to him on the grass. His own weapon, presumably, still fully loaded. He hadn’t gotten off a shot. Very thorough, this killer or killers. Thorough and fast.

  Teagarden walked back inside the house to the atrium, where a uniformed maid lay under a glass table. A potted plant had fallen off the table, spilling dirt on the floor. Someone had kicked a clod of dirt across the atrium, and it had come to rest against a baseboard on the far wall. Once again, the officers on the scene denied having done it. So, the killer/killers, then? Or the boot wearer? Or had one of the inexperienced young policemen simply not taken enough care where he was stepping, covering for his clumsiness when the visitor from Britain pointed it out?

  At the front door, the gardener’s and gate guard’s bodies appeared to be in the position in which they had fallen. Teagarden stepped over the gardener and walked past the guard to the veranda steps. He scanned the front yard. A lawn mower sat abandoned on the lawn, the tracks of its four rubber tires leading back to the graveled circular driveway, where they stopped abruptly halfway across.

  Teagarden frowned. He hadn’t noticed a garden shed anywhere on the grounds. If the gardener was a full-time employee, where did he store his tools? Or was it more likely that he worked for a garden service? It would explain the lawn-mower tracks on the driveway, starting where the gardener had set the machine down—lifted off the bed of a truck, presumably. But if that was the case, where was the truck? The only vehicle on the premises when they’d arrived was a black Cadillac sedan whose license plate indicated it was registered to Moises Gladding, according to the police.

  “Señor?” One of Peña’s officers shattered Teagarden’s concentration. “The capitán wishes to see you.”

  Teagarden followed the officer through to what appeared to be Moises Gladding’s office. The captain and another of his officers were kneeling in front of a bookcase, one corner of a colorful carpet pulled back. A trapdoor in the floor stood open.

  “Look here,” Peña said, “I think I have found where Señor Gladding may have gone.”

  Teagarden watched as the Mexican scrabbled onto a ladder and disappeared down the hatch, calling for them to follow. Inwardly, Teagarden groaned. He hated tunnels, hated cramped spaces of all kinds, but Peña’s men were watching. Reluctantly, he forced himself down the ladder. One of the young officers followed him.

  The tunnel had not been built for a tall man. Stooping, he followed the beam of Peña’s flashlight. Beads of sweat formed on his brow and his breathing turned shallow as he put one foot in front of the other, making his way cautiously along the dank passageway.

  Suddenly, Peña let out a sharp hiss and came to an abrupt halt. Teagarden, hunched over to avoid hitting his head on the rough ceiling, managed to stop himself just in time, but the man behind plowed into him, cursed, then apologized. Peña drew his weapon and shone his light on a ladder leading to another trapdoor overhead.

  “You have a pistola?” the captain whispered.

  “No,” Teagarden said. He almost never carried a gun. Didn’t much care for them.

  The officer behind him squeezed past, weapon drawn. Peña climbed the ladder and pushed the door open an few centimeters, pivoting his flashlight to examine the surrounding area. Apparently satisfied, he flung the hatch wide and climbed out, gun at the ready.

  “Nada.” He signaled the other two to come up.

  The young cop stood by while Teagarden climbed out. Once back in the fresh air, he struggled to regain his dignity, sweeping cobwebs from his hair and the stink of claustrophobic fear from his psyche. Teagarden heard waves crashing nearby, but there was almost no light left in the sky, and it was impossible to see a thing. Peña’s flashlight picked out two sets of prints leading from the exit—not the same shoe prints Teagarden had seen in the garden. These two had been running—heel prints deep, toes digging in for traction. They followed the trail as it weaved through weeds and tall shrubbery, ending at a sandy clearing on a high cliff that overlooked the crashing surf. In the muted light of a quarter moon, the white of the surf glowed dimly.

  The clearing was completely encircled by brush, but tire prints in the sand suggested that a car had been parked there. Impossibly, it seemed to have been driven straight out through dense, unbroken brush. A closer look with the flashlight revealed one set of footprints and some scrape marks in the sand next to the bush. Teagarden took hold of a couple of branches and tugged at the shrubbery. The camouflage greenery moved easily, revealing a rutted roadway that led away from the villa. Straight back to the highway, he guessed.

  “Clever bugger,” he muttered.

  The room was dark when Hannah awoke. The mariachi band across the street was belting out a tune, and by the volume of the chatter and laughter rising from the sidewalks, the holiday town’s nighttime revelries were well underway. She lay sprawled on her back, watching the dance of shadow on the ceiling cast by the lights outside. The curtains wafted lazily in the open window, the breeze carrying the smell of something wonderful. She raised her wrist to check her watch, then realized she hadn’t worn one.

  Rolling over with a groan, she switched on a bedside lamp and fumbled in her pack for her cell phone. She flipped it open to check the time. Nearly eight.

  She’d had the phone on vibrate and she’d missed two calls while she was sleeping. When she checked to see who from, John Russo’s number came up twice. She smiled. She’d told him she wouldn’t be home until Wednesday night, but apparently, the guy missed her. Sweet.

  She debated calling him now, but then images of the carnage at Gladding’s villa came back to her, churning her insides. As much as she wanted to hear his voice, she had more pressing problems.

  She thought about Donald Ackerman at The Blue Gecko, and how he’d tried to dissuade her from going out there. Had he known? The federal agents who’d come to her door had said the arms dealer was dealing with people to whom Washington didn’t want to be linked. Those FBI guys had wanted his place bugged, but D.C.’s myriad intelligence agencies were notorious for running compartmentalized operations with no thought of keeping their sister organizations in the loop. Had the CIA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Defense Intelligence Agency or someone else pulled a wet job down here in an effort to eliminate a potential source of embarrassment or scandal to the Administration? Was someone looking to bury dirty secrets before they leaked?

  If so, they’d done a piss-poor job of it, Hannah thought angrily. Gladding might have been the target, but the killers seemed to have missed him altogether and taken out a raft of innocent bystanders instead.

  It didn’t seem possible that someone in Washington could order such a massacre. She wasn’t naive about her own government’s involvement in black ops, no matter how many laws Congress passed to rein in the worst of the cowboys. Foreign policy, after all, had always been the art of the possible, and when you had vast resources, minimal accountability and the catch-all cloak of national security to hide behind, an awful lot was possible—including assassination, direct or by proxy.

  On the other hand, Moises Gladding swam in a veritable cesspool of international bad actors. He had to have any number of lethal enemies. Who knew who the guy might have shortchanged or double-crossed over the years?

  She sat up and stretched her arms and spine, trying to work out the tension of the day and other kinks added by the lumpy mattress. Arching her neck, head tilting to one side then the other, her gaze fell on the leather portfolio she’d left propped against the bureau. She froze.

  What if she had this all wrong? What if the killers had been after the painting? It would have been delivered hours before they showed up if she hadn’t been taken a later flight that morning. In fact, if she hadn’t been sidetracked by Sergio’s attempt to steal the painting and then by her visit to Donald Ackerman’s bar, she might have still been
at the villa herself when the killers showed up.

  She grabbed the case and put it on the bed, unzipped it and removed the painting. Turning the artwork on its face, she ripped the protective paper from the back of the frame. Wishing she knew more about art, she examined the exposed back of the canvas once more, just as she’d done the night before she’d left home. Last night, she realized. Good God, would this day never end?

  When she and Rebecca had gone out to his studio, August Koon had mentioned that he’d reworked this painting several times before it was completed to his satisfaction. He was too easily satisfied, she thought ruefully, leaning the frame against the wall. He should have gone it over again with a house-painting roller. A blank canvas couldn’t have been less appealing.

  Why would Moises Gladding pay a quarter of a million dollars for something that Gabe might have done while still in diapers?

  She thought about the paintings she’d seen hanging on the walls of his villa, bright, colorful pieces, some realistic, some abstract. What did she know? Maybe this piece was a worthy addition to that collection. But two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollars’ worthy? Even Rebecca had thought it was overpriced, with August Koon riding a short wave of popularity in the current market.