by Moulton, CD
Clint went to Gualaca. Gordo and passengers, three men, had come through and had stayed an afternoon, then left. They asked about Boquete and points between.
Boquete. They didn’t go there.
Calderas? No. Clint was going all over the place to no advantage and was getting tired of spending his day in a bus. There was a nice, fairly new Honda XL for sale at a very good price just outside of Gualaca. Clint swore he would never own another car when he moved to PAnamá, but it had become necessary. He had plenty of money in the bank from some jobs, more than he had any use for, so he sighed and bought the thing and insurance and such. He had a license for Panamá so sighed and swore again and headed toward the carretera from that end. He stopped in Dolega, Anastasia and Concepcion – where he found they had stayed last night, then drove off toward Panamá City about two hours ago. There were three. They stayed at the hotel just about a mile toward David. Clint went to the hotel where he learned that Dennis and Besford were now accompanied by a Carlos Samosa, Panamanian, from Veraguas. They were headed in that direction.
Santiago again. Clint was learning he could get as tired of driving as he did of buses.
Santiago, and they might have passed through. Wanda thought she saw Gordos’s taxi at The Pyramid half an hour or so ago. The girl at the cash drawer at the restaurant in The Pyramid said they stopped for about ten minutes. One of them jumped on the bus for Panamá City that was just leaving. The other two, a dark man and a blond man, left with the taxi. She didn’t see which way they went.
The Latino man was the one who caught the bus. He was carrying a suitcase and a maleta. She noted that because people seldom used both. One or the other, usually only a small maleta for the Panamanians. Clint decided that most probably meant Veraguas, but why did the Veragueño go toward Panamá City?
Only way to find out was to go to Veraguas. Clint had a decent meal at The Pyramid, spoke with several friends en route from David to Panamá City, then got in his car and headed for Veraguas. This kind of legwork (okay, bus and car-work) was what ninety percent of detective work amounted to. At least he was learning something this time. That wasn’t always the case.
Veraguas
Clint parked at the little La Tipica Restaurant in Veraguas, got out of the car, stretched, swore and went inside. There were only two patrons this time of the afternoon, so he was able to talk with the owner for a bit. He knew who Gordo was and that he came there a lot, but he didn’t know why, other than fares. The businessmen in Santiago would take a taxi instead of the bus. It wasn’t that much and was faster and more pleasant.
Clint was not going to drive anymore today! He asked about the best hotel in the moderate price range and was told the owner, Samuel Amorosa, had three nice rooms he rented right there. Air conditioning and cable TV, though the hot water was turned off this time of the year. The water came from the tank at a reasonably comfortable temperature and electricity for commercial was very expensive.
Clint always preferred a cool shower so took the $21.00 room. It was surprisingly comfortable and was close to almost everything. There was a popular night club about two blocks away and shopping was from there on into the centro.
Clint cleaned up and rested for an hour, then went to the bar. It seemed to be the most popular one in this part of Veraguas. Gordo and the two Canadians were sitting at the bar. The taxi was outside. There wasn’t anything in it.
Confront them? Call in the police? Wait and watch?
He decided to wait and watch. He’d try to start a conversation. He took a stool next to Gordo and nodded to the three, then said, “I think I saw you in Almirante at the dock near the water taxi a few days ago. You were with a girl from Ireland?”
“Uh! Er, that is, we went to Bocas for a night,” Besford answered. “We weren’t much impressed. Shannon, the girl, stayed. We decided we’d see the rest of Panamá.”
“Yeah. Bocas is the kind of place you either like or don’t. It’s a party town, what with the surfers and backpackers,” Clint said. “I kind of like it for a few days at the time, then want to go elsewhere.
“You just left her there? You weren’t traveling together?”
“Oh, no! We met her in Changuinola. She said she came to Panamá via Sixola and that was her first stop. She was going to Bocas the next day, we were going to Bocas the next day so we sort of went together. She was a sort of strange one!” Dennis said. It sounded rehearsed to Clint. They’d made up a story to tell. They’d stick to it. Gordo even said she’d ridden in his taxi from Changuinola to David with them and she did seem a little strange. She promised to pay her part of the ride, then stuck it to the guys. They ended up paying for her.
“She was really a bitch on wheels!” Besford said sourly. “She’d be your best friend, then stick you in the ass! She, uh, used us to find a place to stay and get meals cheap and all that, then takes off with some black dude she met in that little bar by the bus station in Almirante!”
“Taxi? You say you drove a taxi from here to Changuinola? I’ll bet that was some fare!” Clint said to Gordo.
“I, er, that is, took a couple of people in the development business there. Two hundred twenty dollars! I was going to ask two hundred, one of them said they would pay that and not a penny more so I acted like I might or might not, then agreed. These people were coming here anyway and I didn’t have a return fare so I only charged them fifty. It was found money for me.
“As a driver, never tell anyone what you’ll pay. Ask the cuenta, then bargain a bit for that kind of trip.
“I saw you drive in so I know I’m not giving the stick to another taxi.”
Clint laughed and said he’d learned that a long time ago. He chatted with them a bit, then talked to a pretty girl who accompanied him back to his room. It was a great night!
In the morning Clint went to the restaurant downtown near the bus terminal. It was the only place open at five thirty. He had hojaldres, bolitas and coffee and chatted with the woman running the place. There were only a few Indios there that early and she was suspicious of them. Clint said they were the only people he trusted as a group. There were a few rotten apples, but that was true of any group of people. He managed to sound like he was just chatting, but she got the point. Clint didn’t have patience with bigots.
He soon went to the table where four of the Indios were sitting and said, “Coin dega! Tica Clint.” (Good morning. I am Clint)
One of them grinned and said, in excellent English, “That is Ngoberé. We speak a different dialect here. Good morning. I am Solbiero, this is Tomas, this is Sandros and this is Fredrico.”
“I’m a detective,” Clint said, knowing the best way to get along with anyone is to be up-front and yourself. “I’m interested in some people who came in yesterday. Gordo, the taxi driver, and two Canadians with him.”
“Gordo is a shithead and a ladron,” Sandros said in not-as-good English. “If they came with him they are not to be trusted.”
“I figured as much. I just want to know what they’re up to here. I think they killed a woman in Bocas.
“Do you know what may have been the reason Gordo went to Bocas with the woman?”
“The red-haired lady? She lived with him a week or so. They had some kind of plan about something. She is the dead woman?”
Clint nodded. “We’ll speak Spanish if any of you don’t speak English. Do you know anything at all about her?”
“She met with a man in Santiago a lot and with Juan Ysalas, the lawyer. They had some kind of thing. The man from Santiago came twice to see her. The lawyer brought some papers,” Sandros answered.
“She met with Aldo once. He went to the house and she was the only one there. He stayed an hour,” Fredrico said. “We work in the finca that is all the way around the place he stays if you wonder why we know so much about them.”
They chatted awhile. Clint ordered a large plate of hojaldres and large coffees for everyone. They seemed very good people, not unlike the Ngobe, but different in some
ways. They were intelligent, as most of the Indigenos were.
Clint had another few things to research when they left for work. He knew where Gordo’s house was and that the finca all around grew crops and pastured cows in rotation of the fields. The four were the managers of the whole finca, which was something over 500 hectares in size. The barns and storage sheds were behind and to one side of Gordo’s place.
Clint went back to the restaurant/inn where he was staying for a second light breakfast and to chat with the one couple who were staying in the rooms. They were from Germany and came every year. They were partners in a small ranch they had financed with an Indio family. It was doing very well for the area. It paid for their yearly vacation and the Indio family were very well-off by local standards. It was so very seldom things worked out well for everyone in a deal anymore. Very sad world we live in.
After the breakfast he asked Amoroso if he knew the lawyer, Ysalas.
He shrugged. “He’s a lawyer. What can I say?”
“One of those?”
Samuel grinned. “They’re all ‘one of those.’ It’s what a lawyer is. I don’t suppose he’s worse than the rest, but he’s not better, either. If his lips are moving, he’s lying.”
Clint found where his office was and strolled around town awhile. He dropped into the office about eleven, but the girl said he was working on a case where he must be in Panamá City for two more days.
He ran into Besford at the hardware store and said “Hello.” Besford was buying welding rod and plate steel. He said he had to make a security door or everything they had there would end up disappearing a little at the time. Clint said that was a problem in any of the Latin American countries. The people didn’t have very much and would take anything that wasn’t welded down – even that, at times. Locks didn’t mean much when the more practiced thieves were in the area, though he didn’t think many of them were here. More in parts of Panamá City and Colon. Costa Rica was getting bad, but Panamá was very much safer, both from violence and theft.
Besford agreed that Costa Rica was impossible anymore. San Juan was now as bad as Limon always had been.
They parted. Clint grinned. So this one had spent time in Costa Rica. Sergio could get any information they might have on him and his friend. Shannon was supposed to have come from Costa Rica, according to what had been said – but she did not come through Sixola. That most probably meant Frontera. Sergio could check that. He probably already had. Clint called him to find they had all been reported about in Costa Rica. Dennis had been in some trouble when some thugs tried to rob him and he’d put two of them in the hospital with various broken bones. It had been determined that he was merely defending himself from robbery and he was released.
Clint went to a little tienda on the corner of the road into the finca where Gordo was staying. After about an hour and a half the taxi went by toward Veraguas. The three were together. Clint decided it might be a good time to snoop around. He had left the car at the inn and taken a taxi to the tienda. It was about a kilometer and a half to the house. Fifteen minutes. If he had half an hour he could be in and look around, then go to chat with his four friends of this morning if it looked like he may be found there.
Treasure Located
The place was between just livable and semi-Okay. It wasn’t clean and there was trash in the yard. Clint watched for a few minutes, then went to the door to knock and call out “Buenas!” No one answered.
He could see Fredrico and Sandros working on a fence on the far side of a shed. He managed not to be seen by them as he went to the side of the house and into a small attached bodega. There was a door from the bodega into the house that was left open (if you used a little device often seen on TV detective shows).
The inside was dark. There were heavy cloths and flattened cardboard cartons covering the windows. There was still enough light that he didn’t need more than the light from his celular now and then.
They had built a steel safe with three large padlocks holding the heavy lid down. It was tightly welded along all seams. Clint estimated it would weigh about eighty pounds empty and it was more than he could do to lift one corner an inch off the floor. He didn’t find anything else except some letter from Ysalas and a lawyer in Panamá City.
He heard the taxi coming along the rough road and waited until it was parked in front to leave through the bodega, climb the fence onto the finca and stroll over to the entrance road to call out to Sandros and Fredrico. He said he wanted to see the place and to see where Gordo lived in case he ever needed to come there. The taxi was parked out front so he supposed that was the place.
Sandros winked at him. He had seen him. Fredrico said that was the place.
They chatted as the two went to the shed with their tools and Solbiero and Tomas joined them with their own tools. They locked everything up and went out front where a rusty old GMC truck took them all into Veraguas.
He was at least partly right in his assumptions. That there was something taken, probably cash and precious metal bars, from that little reef, Shannon was killed and the stuff was now in Veraguas at Gordo’s place.
Gordo, Besford, Dennis and Ysalas were in on it. Minimum.
How did Shannon O’Brien fit? What was her connection?
To learn what was really going on Clint would have to track things from her. She was somehow the key to the whole thing.
He stayed the night, then headed back toward Santiago, thought a bit and went on to David. He called Sergio and Judi to find anything they knew about O’Brien, then caught a plane to San Jose’. That was the only place he might find information about her. She had stayed there for two months, according to her passport.
The bar where the Canadien met them, The Red Lantern, had a few tourists and five or six locals. They weren’t, any of them, the kind of people Clint would trust farther than he could throw the bar. It was seedy, but much of San Jose’ is anymore. He had a $2.00 beer and sipped it slowly. No one seemed interested in him – except when he paid for the beer. Two of them saw him change a twenty. He smirked to himself and said he was going to walk to the hotel. Maybe he’d be back tomorrow, maybe he’d find a place more to his liking.
He went out and turned left, toward a darker street. He saw the two from the corner of his eye as he turned into the street and stepped behind a croton bush. The two came looking for him and he stepped out, acting like he’d stopped to piss. They converged on him from either side. One pulled out a long switchblade and said, “Dinero, gringo!’ The other said, in English, “You pay or die!”
He stepped to the side and grabbed the arm with the switchblade in the hand twisted it behind him until he screamed, then chopped him in the neck. He dropped like a bag of wet sand.Clint turned toward the other, who was starting to run down the street. Clint was faster. He caught him and gut-punched him. He went to his knees, retching.
“An answer or two, ladron, or you die here!” he snapped. The hood gasped and sobbed.
“Who met with the Irish woman a week or so ago in that bar?”
The hood gasped and shook his head. Clint grabbed him by the hair, jerked his head back and slapped him hard.
“I asked a question!”
“Two guys from Canada! Jimmy and Chuck! Surfers or something! They met right there and she said she saw one of them in Ontario at some place with someone, a godfather, and wanted to talk to them about a proposition!”
“Before they came?”
“Just Nikolo, the Russian mafia guy. She lived with him a month or so. He was pissed as hell when she left. He said she was a thief. She took his papers or something. Maybe his passport. He was that pissed.”
Clint let him go and walked off. That may be his connection. He had to find Nikolo.
He went to two other low-class places to find what he could about Nikolo. It seemed he stayed at a private home just above town. Nobody went there. It was dangerous. Lots of people knew him, none claimed friendship.
Good enough! Clint went back t
o the hotel and sacked out.
In the morning Clint had a decent breakfast and headed out of town to the house described. He went to the heavy gate and called out, getting an answer from a call box by the gate, but under a branch. He was asked what he wanted.
“I have to speak with Nikolo. I’m Clint Faraday, from Bocas del Toro, Panamá.”
“What does Bocas have to do with me?”
“They got your stash and have it hidden in another place. They killed the O’Brien woman.”
There was a pause, then a large bullish man came from the house with a key to open the gate.
“Nikolo?” Clint asked.
“Huh-uh. He’s in the house. You carrying?”
“No.”
He nodded and led Clint into the house where another man, not quite so large, greeted him and told Viktor, the first, to bring coffee and whatever their guest desired.
“I’ve heard of you or you would not be inside this house. Armokov? Panamá City?”
“Vasily? He’s between an acquaintance and a friend. We had some minor business dealings and got along pretty well. I’m up-front and don’t play games. He liked that. He said he always knew exactly where I stand.”
“Ah! And you come here to announce that the fucking bitch is dead and my ... stash, you called it ... is gone. That’s as up-front as it gets! I can see why Vasily respects you so!
“Talk about somebody who is never up-front with anybody and you’ve got that backstabbing bitch dead to rights!
“Where is the property?”
“I’ll tell you if it’ll make things easier or better in Panamá. We don’t want anymore of this kind of thing screwing up the lives of innocent people. If only your bunch is involved and all things will be handled outside of Panamá I’ll tell you.
“What’s it about? How much cash and how much other?”
“The cash isn’t important. It was only included so that our people wouldn’t have a lot of trouble moving the rest of it. It was something over two million. There are fifteen bars of platinum, fifteen of gold and a lot of silver. There are about three and a half kilos of uncut emeralds and two kilos of best-grade diamonds.”
