The Rita Farmer Mystery series Box Set Page 21

  Detectives came in and looked carefully at what Gary had written on the yellow pad, and I realized they were going to treat that list as something of a Rosetta Stone. They stood talking to each other in neat sport coats of maroon and navy hopsack.

  Fine, I thought. Maybe that’s exactly what it is.

  It appeared Gary had been stabbed to death. “Looks like he put up some resistance,” a skinny-faced younger cop, high on the sight of a dead man, had said out loud in the corridor, “but the first strike incapacitated him to a large extent.” He was addressing his boss, the detective who would interview me in a minute. “I bet it was a surprise to him.”

  I saw the eager servility in his face and thought, Boy, the beat goes on.

  The detective shifted his weight toward the younger cop and said, “Be quiet.”

  When a parent dies, the children cling together even if they’d fought like dingoes before. So it was with Mark Sharma and me. Not that we’d been overtly hostile, but there had been a lack of warmth, that’s for sure. He arrived about fifteen minutes after the police. A reporter had called him; Daniel had been right about that. We locked eyes and made a silent pact to talk later.

  Up until tonight I’d thought he was a cute little thing, a guy who, if he’d been born American with big American muscles, would have excelled at college football then gone into industrial sales, where his commissions would be big enough to support a family and a country club lifestyle. I could see him hitting a four-iron or something to the green at Riviera.

  I thought he lived to serve his master and role model, the gold-plated legal genius of L.A., but when I saw his face come through the door I realized he’d been a python all along. His lips were narrow and tight around his jaw. He moved smoothly and with more reptilian authority than I’d have thought possible. Even so, I felt relief. He would not have come if he were still somewhere washing off blood.

  Insofar as the cops permitted him to, he took charge, organizing things in the corridor, thinking of logistics, thinking ahead. The police questioned each of us separately, around the corner and far down the next corridor. The detective who questioned me was bald with a sparse mustache and deep-sunken eyes, and he showed neither friendliness nor hostility. He jotted notes as I recalled the events of my evening.

  Then he said, “Haven’t I seen you somewhere?”

  I looked at him with my full open face. “I don’t know.”

  “I’ve seen you before.”

  When a cop says that to you, you go pale even if you haven’t murdered anybody.

  “Maybe so; I don’t remember,” I said. “Where?”

  He wiggled his pen. His nostrils flared. “The library! You were telling a story to the kids at the library downtown!”

  I smiled weakly.

  He said, “Month or two ago. I took my kid.”

  “What’s your kid’s name?”

  “Mike.”

  “I have a boy named Petey. Maybe they played together that day.”

  “Yeah.” He watched me. “Gary Kwan was there with his kid too.”

  “Oh! Uh—yeah!”

  Mark came out and used his cell phone to call Steve Calhoun. It was appropriate for Steve, being an actual friend of the family, to go over and stay with Jacqueline. A cop said another cop had already been dispatched to break the news to her. “Hurry up,” said Mark into the phone, his Indian-homeland lilt a bit strained. “No, there’s much to be sorted out.”

  I watched him work the situation, I watched him actually work the police personnel. Cops don’t always feel real buddy-buddy with defense attorneys, and I saw Mark Sharma busily striving to ingratiate himself. He asked them if they wanted coffee and sandwiches, and they actually said yes they did, so he sent for some, which a uniformed officer brought up.

  It didn’t take the police long to be finished with us, maybe an hour.

  Mark and I walked out together past the news trucks. He shooed the reporters away, “But I promise a press conference tomorrow!”

  “When?” called out one.

  “Two p.m.”

  Late enough in the day to have a game plan ready, I thought, early enough to make the evening news.

  In the cool dimness of the parking garage we stopped and faced each other.

  I said, “I guess now’s as good a time as any.”

  “Yes,” agreed Mark.

  We stood at one of the fat concrete columns that held up everything. The garage smelled of rubber and old hamburger wrappers.

  We evaluated each other narrowly, again like the orphaned dingoes. It was not necessary to go somewhere for a drink; that would have been vulgar, and moreover we were both tired and would have to get up very early tomorrow, if we could sleep at all. He was sweating. So, I guess, was I.

  I didn’t trust him, but felt it wise to act as if I did.

  I told him how Gary and I had met, and exactly what I’d been hired to do for Eileen.

  “I’ve been giving her acting lessons all along. Helping her appear more sympathetic to the jury.”

  “I knew it!” he exclaimed, but obviously he hadn’t. “You are not a real paralegal.”

  “That’s right.”

  He smiled. “I saw a difference in Eileen immediately. Yes, yes. She looked mean, at first. Juries are stupid. Gary understood this.” He gazed off into the distance with an expression of respect on his face, as if Gary’s ghost were standing in the shadows. “I admire that strategy,” he said. “I am in charge of the case now.”

  “Mark, which case? Eileen’s? Or Gary’s?”

  His confidence didn’t waver. “The case on trial now. You must understand that—”

  “Mark, what did you and Gary argue about tonight?”

  “Oh, so that’s how the lieutenant knew.”

  “Yes, I told him Gary called me in after firing you for the night, as he put it.”

  “That’s what he said?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s all he said about me?”

  He was working me, just as he’d worked the police.

  “But what did Gary and you—”

  “We argued about whether to put Eileen on the stand.”

  “I thought you guys were in accord on that. That she’s going to testify.”

  “Gary had doubts. But we will put her on the stand. I’ll move for one day’s recess only. We must keep this trial on track.”

  I half collapsed against the pillar. “Mark, one day? You’ve got to be out of—”

  “Steve and I have already talked. He is—”

  “You have?”

  “—very supportive of me. I lead this team from now on. Rita, the murder of Gary will explode all over the city tomorrow. How long should I wait? We cannot make this jury wait. We cannot start all over again in three months with a new jury. We must act.”

  I took my keys out of my purse. “Well, I guess it’s a good career move for you.”

  For nonnative speakers of American English, sarcasm is the last thing they pick up. “Yes,” agreed Mark Sharma. “We will resume the defense of Eileen Tenaway the day after tomorrow. I will work tonight.” He patted his briefcase. “I have everything I need.”

  I stared at him. How can I explain it? I’m always searching for the motive in people, always trying to peel them back and look beneath the surface. And that’s served me well as an actress.

  Mark said, “The police will find Gary’s murderer. We will let them do their job. Your job, on the other hand, is finished. You may go back to your acting.”

  I stood for a second, absorbing that. He watched me closely with his large black eyes.

  “All right.” I turned to go, relief flooding me like cool water. Hey, everybody, I just got my life back!

  But what the hell am I going to do for rent money!

  “Sure,” I said over my shoulder. “Put her on the stand without me. She ought to be fine. Just fine, all by herself.” I strode toward my car.

  “Rita!” Mark said.

  I turned
back to him. “Don’t bother asking her if she wants me, because I’m certain—”

  “Perhaps you should stay on the team after all.” He tugged at his Gary-style forelock. “Eileen and I will discuss it. But if you do stay to help us, I will not pay you one thousand dollars per day.”

  “I see. You snooped into Gary’s employment records.”

  “He made me a partner in his firm. It is now my firm.”

  That was news to me. But irrelevant right then.

  I said, “You will pay me a thousand a day. It’s Eileen’s money, anyway, right? You owe me three thousand so far this week.”

  “I’ll pay five hundred.”

  I turned. “So long, Mark. It’s been good working with—”

  “All right!” he shouted.

  Once again I turned to his face, flushed dark with blood. “Mark, who do you think murdered Gary? Who could have come in like that, so quickly in between your leaving and my arriving? And why, for God’s sake?”

  He fixed me with the kind of look I remembered from high school debate class, a best-defense-is-a-good-offense look.

  “Who do you think did it?” he asked with a little upturn in his voice.

  Fuck you.

  I said, “Well, Mark, someone who doesn’t want him to defend Eileen. Someone who would benefit from him suddenly being out of the picture.”

  He smiled. “Or someone who was angry that he would not cheat on his wife.”

  Oh, fuck you, buddy.

  “Or,” I suggested, “someone who lost his temper in an argument.”

  The reptilian smile did not waver.

  “Or,” he said, “someone with a completely different problem.” My mind was like an oven with too much stuff trying to bake in it.

  I wanted to talk it all over with Gary.

  “Dear God,” I muttered.

  Standing there with Mark Sharma in the dead of night discussing savagery and blood and cops and impenetrable mystery—this was the Los Angeles I never thought I’d get to know.

  Chapter 27 – No Toys Today

  OURO PRÊTO, BRAZIL

  “Uh-uh-uh!” was the sound Esteban, the gem buyer, made when George Rowe’s fists snapped into his upper gut, left-right-left.

  Rowe punched him five times. The last two times Esteban made no sound because the first three had driven all the air out of him.

  He toppled heavily to the floor of his office in the building on Ouro Prêto’s main drag and lay gasping. Rowe said, “If you yell, I’ll kill you.” He had brought no toys with him today.

  A moment ago Esteban was certain he’d had the upper hand. He had figured out that this man who had introduced himself as Tom Webber from Canada had some money at his disposal, and he had figured out that Webber was not really a tourist. He had learned what Mr. Webber was after. And given that he would very much like to leave Ouro Prêto and settle in the Miami region near America, possibly with one of the fashion models who lived there, he had laced his thick fingers behind his head as he had seen his boss Richard Tenaway do, leaned back in his fine leather chair, and said, “I never said one thousand, I said fifty thousand.”

  Rowe, sitting across the desk, had looked at him and sighed. He had, for this next meeting with Esteban, brought a thousand U.S. dollars in an envelope because he had been directed back to Ouro Prêto by someone in Berlin. He was getting tired.

  In the past ten days he had journeyed to São Paulo, he had flown to Berlin, Helsinki, and Madrid, because the young Maria Helena had listened to Tenaway talking about all of those cities. He had promised to show them to her.

  But Rowe had had nothing more than that to go on, and his contacts in those places had been of little help. They weren’t very good contacts. His gut had been uncomfortable the whole time, because it had told him Tenaway hadn’t gone to Europe in the first place. If Rowe had been Tenaway he would not have gone to Europe.

  However, a gem dealer in Berlin had cheerfully shared the fact that young Esteban, the gem buyer in Brazil for Tenaway’s company, Gemini Imports, had accompanied Tenaway to Berlin on several business trips just before Tenaway had disappeared. The German and Tenaway met alone and he would not say what Tenaway had discussed with him.

  For lack of anything better Rowe asked, “Did you like Richard Tenaway?”

  “Oh, yes!” answered the dealer, an apple-cheeked multimillionaire. “Herr Tenaway was a most pleasant man. He possessed—charisma. Women liked him very much, I tell you! Like a little boy. He always looked like a boy ready to steal some chocolate!”

  Herr Gem Dealer laughed a Bavarian belly laugh.

  So Rowe had returned to Ouro Prêto to talk to Esteban. Rowe had come to see Esteban alone, without Raimundo, because Esteban spoke fairly good English.

  With the promise of a bit of money, Esteban revealed that before Tenaway “turned up dead”—with American-style air quotes around that—he had shown a special interest in Esteban, the only full-time Gemini employee in Ouro Prêto. Esteban had become Tenaway’s buffer in acquiring copies of ownership documents to mines that had been locked up in local disputes—bad blood between families, or arguments between local authorities, the ecology people, and legitimate companies. Esteban had been the one to fill out the paperwork requesting these documents from local clerks in the various jurisdictions.

  With these documents Tenaway analyzed the strengths and weaknesses of every player. He would step in with offers to the irresolute ones, getting them to relinquish their property or mineral rights to him, with all proper legal papers, then he would visit the stronger players and make them a deal, which always included something for Tenaway.

  This went on until the Ministry of Mines wised up and put a stop to it.

  Esteban gathered that the profit margin in these deals had been low, anyway. The main outcome seemed to be that one of the mine owners north of town had become quite indebted to Richard Tenaway. Esteban sensed Tenaway was holding this owner, a man named Pedro Rocha Grana, in reserve for some special role in the future.

  Esteban thought he would, for this special work, receive extra money from Richard Tenaway, but he had gotten none.

  He was angry at Tenaway and angrier at himself. So after this Tom Webber approached him to talk about Tenaway and promised him a thousand U.S. dollars, he decided he would not be taken advantage of again. He would be the one to take advantage. This little Tom Webber from Canada was amusing. The money, in an envelope, crossed Esteban’s desk, and they began talking, but then Esteban said he wanted fifty thousand, if Tom Webber really wanted to know something.

  When Webber stepped around the desk, Esteban rose to meet him, thinking he would easily block a blow, but the shorter man had thrust his arms right through Esteban’s and gotten at his solar plexus.

  After he had finished hitting Esteban, Rowe said, “You don’t know anything, do you?”

  George Rowe did not like to beat up men stupider than himself. There was no pleasure in it, even if the man was bigger and stronger, like Esteban. The Brazilian was a smooth, heavy young thing with no clear idea how to protect himself, let alone land a hard punch in Rowe’s face.

  That was how it was, though. Intelligent men tend not to get into fisticuffs with other intelligent men.

  It was a pity Rowe could fight so well, could neutralize a man with a fast combination of traditional punches, or, if he felt it wiser, with an eye-gouge and a hard-soled shoe to the side of the knee, blowing out the joint like a Twinkie. If you did that you had to be prepared for screaming, because that’s what you’d get a whole lot of, until you got out of there. It was a pity he had developed those skills so well but rarely liked to use them. His drumming had helped with the fighting skills, the all-four-limbs coordination, as well as, of course, the rhythm.

  When a demand is made with no commensurate offer placed on the table, that is extortion. Extortion requires direct action.

  But Esteban did have something for this Mr. Webber.

  Lying on the floor, he raised his hands li
ke kitten paws. “I have an address.”

  One day perhaps nine months ago, Esteban had photocopied one of a sheaf of shipping receipts he had found in Tenaway’s briefcase. He had snooped while Tenaway was in the men’s room. The receipts were unusual, showing a series of packages sent to an address in Tijuana, Mexico. Esteban had thought the photocopy might come in useful someday. But Tenaway had vanished before he’d had the chance to use it.

  Rowe left the office with the photocopy of the shipping slip. It didn’t take a long night in front of a crystal ball for him to be fairly sure the packages had contained gems, possibly some cash, Euros perhaps. They would have been transferred from Tijuana to Los Angeles easily. It also stood to reason that somehow this Pedro Rocha Grana, a Brazilian mine owner with international connections, was going to help Tenaway resell the gems once he was ready to start that process. That was the beauty of it—with the gems out of Brazil, so much was possible: bulk sales in the U.S. or Mexico, or more-profitable small-batch sales through a dummy company.

  All this fit Rowe’s feeling all along, that Tenaway would wait at the border until he could know whether it would be worth his while to return for the resources he had secured in Los Angeles.

  Chapter 28 – When Chaos Comes

  A rancid haze settled over me the next day, which was Thursday. It was as if the whole city had turned poisonous—as if micro-bubbles of toxin were raining down on the city, green in color, the exact chartreuse of the mittens of the tiny bully in my first-grade class who had used them to mash snow into my dumb pretty little face that winter, over and over. When the snow melted, she used mud.

  As Mark had foretold, news of Gary’s murder detonated in the city. The morning announcers shouted it over and over, their voices so glad that something really dreadful had happened last night, and I supposed everyone was talking about it over their coffee and muffins. I expected to look up and see skywriting: KWAN MURDERED. SURRENDER RITA.

  Daniel and I had held each other and cried all night.