by Jerold Last
John or Emil said, "I never met either of them." Two more voices, one male and one female, said, "Neither did I."
I turned to Detective Brown. "Is this recording enough to get a judge to sign warrants to search all of their apartments for a .32 caliber pistol or other evidence related to the Vasquez murder?"
"Probably. I'll get started on the affidavit here on my laptop computer while we listen to the rest of this. I can e-mail it to the judge and send my partner over to pick it up. We should have all of the warrants in about an hour or two. You did a great job setting this up, Roger. Thank you."
We went back into listening mode while Brown typed his affidavit. Linda Poras was still trying to get Robert Schantz or one of the others to incriminate themselves. She had obviously taken Vincent's advice to heart and was trying to establish her credentials as a heroine.
"Did any of you ever meet Eugenio Vasquez?" she asked the conspirators.
"I spoke to him on the phone a couple of times, but I never met him in person." That was Jim Schantz's voice. "I spoke to him once when he was still in Bolivia. He called me from his university in Santa Cruz. All I remember from that phone call is that he spoke English with an Australian accent. He called me again from LAX when he arrived at the airport in Los Angeles, the day he was killed. It was clearly the same man on the phone. You couldn't miss the Aussie accent. He had some ideas about selling us the licensing rights on his patents. I told him I'd call him at his hotel the next morning and we'd get together with the folks in the firm who made the decisions the next day.
"I told all of this to Robert and John Hardy as soon as I hung up. Helena Fletcher joined us in the middle of the discussion. He was killed later that night, so nothing else happened that I know anything about."
"How about you three? Did anyone follow up on the phone call?" Linda asked Robert, Hardy, and Fletcher.
Helena Fletcher was the first to answer. "I knew our cash flow was a little less than zero, so it was clearly going to be a problem. That's what I told Robert and John. Then I went home."
Next up was John Hardy. "My advice to Robert was that it would be Vasquez's word against ours if we just went ahead with one or more of his patented drugs. By the time a patent infringement lawsuit brought by a Bolivian national made it through our court system, we'd all be rich and our grandchildren would be the defendants. It made more sense to bluff it out with a hick from Bolivia who spoke English with an Australian accent then to try to pay him off with money we didn't have."
Finally it was Robert's turn. "I never spoke to Vasquez myself. I tried to reach some of the money people who funded Plantacur to sound them out on getting ten or twenty thousand dollars to offer Vasquez, along with some percentage royalty on sales and a couple of cases of Foster's Lager beer if he signed the patents over to us without any fuss. I couldn't reach anyone that late in the day so was going to call them again first thing the next morning. By then Vasquez was dead and the whole issue was moot. We were just going to go ahead with one or two of his drugs and nobody would ever have known what we did."
"What about you, Emil?" Linda asked Emil Proctor.
"This is the first time I've heard any of this. There's no way I'd have gotten involved in this kind of fraudulent infringement of somebody's legally awarded patents if I had known what was going on."
The meeting got back on topic of what to do about Bruce and Vincent. The leadership team talked it to death for the next hour or two, but nobody made any reasonable suggestions and no decisions were made. Clearly, they were all frightened of what the repercussions were going to be when all of this corporate malfeasance came out.
In the meantime, I handed Detective Brown a folded piece of paper. "No peeking allowed. When you finally execute those warrants, here's whose apartment in which I believe you'll find the .32 that was used for the killing. And here are the names of the criminals I want you to arrest for the murder and for conspiracy to commit murder. I'll tell you how I figured it out then if I turn out to be correct. And I will turn out to be correct."
"I've heard that you like to play Sherlock Holmes. I'll bet you $5 that you're wrong."
"It's a bet. How about we all go visit the big meeting at Plantacur now? I doubt they'll ever make any decisions without our help."
Vincent still had his key cards and was still nominally an employee there so we could just walk in, completely legally, at his invitation. Detective Brown led us into the conference room. I was right behind him, followed by Vincent and Bruce. Our arrival created quite a stir.
"You can't just walk in here like this. You're trespassing. If you don't leave immediately, I'm calling the police," the Plantacur COO and lawyer John Hardy sputtered indignantly, brandishing his cell phone like a weapon.
Brown flashed his badge and calmly sat down at the conference table. "We're already here. Everyone sit down and relax, we're all going to be here a while.
"In the meantime I'd like to introduce three detectives, Roger, Bruce, and Vincent. I think all of you have met one or the other of them already."
After a lot of confusion things sorted out and we all sat at the table.
Hardy blustered some more using his weapon of choice, words. "You can't make any of us stay here against our wills. I, for one, am leaving. Right now."
"Vincent, if anyone gets within six feet of that door I want you to forcibly detain them and put them under arrest for fraud, conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to incite assault, and accessory after the fact to murder. Now we're all going to sit here and discuss patent infringement and murder while we wait for the results of several searches done completely legally, with warrants, to be completed. After that, we'll figure out who is going home tonight and who is going to be a guest of the City of Los Angeles' penal system for the foreseeable future."
There was more muttering, but eventually things settled down followed by silence and apparent acceptance of the situation by the management team.
"We've got enough evidence that Plantacur violated a ton of FDA rules and procedures and that corporate finances are already terminally shaky so that to all intents and purposes the company is out of business. You should all think about where you stand with regard to criminal charges. The first one who cooperates fully with our investigation usually gets the best deal in court."
With exquisite timing, Detective Brown's cell phone rang precisely at the end of his comments about inducements for the conspirators to testify against each other. He listened quietly for a moment.
"Good job," he said to someone on the other end of the line. "Follow up with another warrant to go for everything. Bloody clothes, answering machine contents, e-mails and computer records, the whole enchilada. And send me some backup here at Plantacur. We have some arrests to make." He disconnected the phone and made an elaborate ritual of pulling the folded piece of paper out of his pocket.
"I take it that now is the time I should open this note and read it, right Roger?"
I nodded yes.
Detective Brown looked at the note. "I guess you've really earned that reputation we were talking about, Roger."
He pulled a $5 bill out of his wallet and gave it to me. The management team members looked confused by the events occurring and continued to just sit there silently thinking their individual thoughts.
"Does anyone have anything they want to tell me? This would be a good time to start cooperating."
Nothing. Nobody said a word.
"OK, we'll start doing it by the numbers." He stood up, walked around the table, put a hand on Linda Poras shoulder, and said formally, "Linda Poras, I herby arrest you for the murder of Eugenio Vasquez. Anything you say can, and will, be used against you in a court of law." He continued reading her rights under the Miranda Law.
He took a pair of handcuffs out and cuffed her hands behind her back. Just then several uniformed police officers entered the room, including a woman officer who proceeded to search Dr. Poras for weapons. None were found.
Detective Br
own walked over to Robert Schantz and repeated the arrest process. This time the charges were conspiracy to commit murder and accessory before and after the fact to murder.
Poras and Schantz were escorted out of the room on their way to jail by uniformed officers.
He turned to the very subdued scientists and executives still sitting around the conference table, apparently in shock.
"Some of you will be charged with various crimes after things get sorted out. For the moment, you are all free to go. I wouldn't try to leave town if I were you. I would encourage you to think about voluntarily assisting in the investigation of Plantacur's business practices when you are offered the opportunity to do so."
An hour or two later we were all sitting at the dining room table in our house discussing the case, nibbling on crackers and cheese, and drinking an Argentine Malbec wine.
"Does my $5 buy me the right to hear how you deduced who killed Vasquez and where we'd find the murder weapon?" asked Detective Brown.
I looked at Brown, Bruce, Vincent, and Suzanne. "Sure. Eugenio Vasquez was a pretty sophisticated, well-traveled scientist. He'd been trained in Bolivia and Australia, and had been to meetings in a lot of other big cities including Lima, Peru and Santiago, Chile. He knew enough to be careful in a crime-ridden city like Los Angeles. I didn't see any way he'd let some strange man get close enough to him in a dark garage to empty the entire clip from a .32 into his torso without any defensive wounds on the hands or arms. On the other hand, a beautiful woman like Linda Poras could have gotten close in a whole bunch of ways. And a .32 suggested a woman; most men would have been more likely to use a 9mm or a .38 to shoot someone.
"Robert knew too much about Eugenio not to have met him. The Australian accent and the Foster Beer jokes were the things I most remember talking about when I met him in Lima. And he had the motive. My guesses are that he supplied the murder weapon and that he and Linda had an ongoing relationship outside of the office, maybe going back to the earlier companies they had worked together in. I'd check both of those possibilities out when you get a chance."
"You're right about both," replied the detective. "Jim Schantz was the first rat to scurry off the sinking ship. He told us that his brother was a gun collector and had the usual quartet of pistols for competitive shooting, a .22, a .32, a .38, and a .45. And that Robert and Linda had been living together off and on since they met at the first company where they both worked.
"And I want to thank you all for pointing me in the right direction and solving this murder. I owe each of you one for all the work you put into this case, and won't forget it. I like your style and will probably see you again."
THE END
NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
After you finish "The Body in the Parking Structure": Please use a bit of your valuable time to write a review and post it with the dealer where you purchased your copy. Amazon makes this quick and easy on the book's page. Written reviews are important to both readers and authors. A few sentences are all that are necessary. Of course I hope you will enjoy this story, but even if you didn’t please think about providing a review.
Thank you.
If you want to read more about Suzanne and Roger, their previous South American mystery novels "The Surreal Killer", set in Peru and Northern Chile, "The Ambivalent Corpse", set mostly in Uruguay, and "The Empanada Affair", set in Salta in Northwest Argentina, are also available from Amazon. The fourth novel in this series, "The Matador Murders", will be published on Amazon early in August 2012.
You can learn a lot more about Suzanne, Roger, and the author at their blog site, conveniently located at http://suzanneandrogermysteries.blogspot.com
