by Ed Teja
Then the rain came and for a time we couldn’t see anything outside the rails of the boat. The drops the storm flung at us were big and stung my skin, but they felt cold and cleansing, too. As the rain came harder, the wind softened. Maggie attached hoses to nozzles on the underside of either side of the awning. The baggy canvas began collecting water that ran through the hoses. She let the first water go over the side, letting it wash the awning clean. Then she lifted the cockpit cushions and put the ends of each hose into the opening of the boat’s water tanks. There was the wonderful gurgle of the tanks filling with the best drinking water known to mankind.
“Thank God,” she said. “It’s been a dry year.”
Soon both tanks were full. The storm eased but Maggie hauled out plastic buckets that she used for laundry and caught what was still coming down. Suddenly the storm was gone, leaving the sky a brilliant blue and absolutely clear. Everything felt fresh and clean.
It’s a good omen, I thought as I toweled off and dressed. That is a good way to start the day. Things will be clearer and cleaner now.
After breakfast we headed into town, and Maggie dropped me off near the coffee shop Victoria had named on the telephone while she went to the Mercado Central to provision.
“I don’t know how long I’ll be,” I told her. “If I learn anything useful, I’ll want to follow it up right away.”
“Do you know where to catch the jeep back to Mochima?” she asked. I did. “I’ll meet you back at the boat.”
The coffee shop Victoria had picked was an outdoor place in El Centro called Jardin Sport. I walked in and looked around the various sections, but she wasn’t there yet. Students from the university occupied a few of the tables, but it was mostly empty. I bought a coffee and sat at a table facing the entrance. I wanted some kind of pastry. I felt one of my sweet cravings coming on. All they sold in the way of food seemed to be some unappetizing cheese sandwiches. But the coffee was good and rich. I could always grab something at a panadería later.
Victoria walked in just a few minutes later, probably exactly on time, but since I didn’t wear a watch, I couldn’t be sure. She had lost the business suit in favor of a short, black leather skirt, matching boots and purse, and a purple silk blouse. Her more than shoulder-length hair was pulled back with a leather band. All the guys in the place watched her walk in. She smiled a greeting at me and asked if I wanted another coffee.
“I’d rather have information,” I said.
She smiled. “Let’s start small. That way we can build on a foundation of successes, even though they are little.” She went to the counter, bought two coffees and brought them back to the table. “Have you decided anything?” she asked after she had tasted her coffee.
“About my brother’s case?”
She nodded. “And your future.”
“I’m sure he’s innocent.” I pushed the ticket across the table. “He seems to have no one in his corner, so I think I’ll stick around.”
She sighed, picked it up, then put it in her purse. “That is an expensive act of faith.”
“It’s only money.”
“Spoken like a true pauper.”
“If you wanted me to believe that your client is only interested in keeping things low profile, why are you having me followed?”
She held her coffee cup with both hands, resting her elbows on the table, and peering over it at me, studying me. “Am I doing that, Martin Billings?”
“I think so. You knew about the tour of the park, for instance.”
She smiled, looking pleased. “That was purely luck. Even lawyers are lucky on occasion. One of my colleagues was in Mochima on vacation. He saw Chris when he went out to your lady’s boat. Knowing of my interest, he called to tell me that you three had a short conversation before getting into his craft to go for your ride. It pleased me to make you think I had eyes everywhere. But I didn’t have you followed.”
“Well, someone is following me, and you are as good a candidate as anyone. As well informed as you are, you must have a fairly good network of people.”
“You flatter me,” she said with an amused smile.
“I didn’t really intend to.”
“I understand. But in your remarkable enthusiasm, you seem to have mixed up your villains and good guys.”
My coffee tasted good and helped calm me. I knew that if I pushed her, it wouldn’t help. “Why don’t you help me sort them out?” I suggested. “Want to help me put white and black hats on each of the players?”
She smiled; her eyes lit up. “That sounds like fun,” she surprised me by saying. “Who do we have to choose among? Let’s see, there are Tim, of course, and Antonio, and your Maggie. When the crime was committed, you were in Trinidad and Antonio is gone. Who else is there?”
“There is the gringo who was watching María’s house yesterday.”
“A gringo?”
“Ah, I had hoped he worked for you, but if not, then maybe I can surprise you. Yes, tall, skinny, had sunglasses with reflective lenses, the silvered things, you know him?” She shook her head. “And we have Ramón.”
“Yes, Tim’s friend.” She reached into her purse and pulled out a photograph. It was of Ramón and had been taken with a telephoto lens.
“So, there is Ramón’s boss, or former boss—he of the missing drugs, and then whomever Ramón was trying to sell them to.”
“You’ve learned a lot,” she said. “Don’t leave out whoever Ramón’s boss originally intended to sell the drugs to. They would also have a vested interest.”
“And then there is Victoria López and whoever she works for.” She nodded. “With the minor problem that these are not all necessarily separate people.”
She dabbed her mouth with a napkin. “How so?”
“One possibility is that Victoria López or whoever she works for is either Ramón’s boss or the buyer.”
She grabbed my hand enthusiastically. “Of course! I hadn’t seen that at all, but it is entirely logical. Given what you know now, this Victoria López could be, or represent, the head of a major drug cartel.”
“And thereby up to her pretty neck in all of this.”
“Thank you for the pretty part.”
“My pleasure.”
She finished her coffee and stared off thoughtfully. “That does make things awkward, my being one of your suspects. But let’s continue. Who do you peg as the one who killed Antonio?”
I didn’t know why I should tell her anything, but I convinced myself that I had to give information to get it, and nothing I knew would help anyone or hurt Tim. At least that’s what I hoped.
“It could be almost anyone,” I said, “including people we don’t even know yet. I think Antonio was killed because of something he saw on Las Negadas, a drug deal of some kind. And he thought he saw Tim there. Or maybe he saw Ramón and thought that because they were friends it was a deal Tim was involved in. My guess is that whoever it really was, whoever he confused with Tim, killed him to prevent him from working out what really happened.”
A frown made her look serious. “That means we didn’t narrow the field much at all, doesn’t it?” I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of an answer. “Did you learn anything more on your park tour?”
“Mostly that fishermen are not great environmentalists, and that all the corporations want in on the eco-PR. I made the guess that maybe you worked for an oil company and this was all tied to some ecology cover up. That would have been more interesting to me than drugs.”
“But Chris says no?”
“His big problem seems to be a fear of being upstaged by corporate Venezuela in a rush to reap the social benefits of cleaning up the environment.”
She laughed, relaxing again. “Good.”
“I’ve told you the little I know, now it’s your turn.”
She wagged a finger at me. “No, we are not playing turns. I will say that you now know most of what I know, except of course
, I’m not a player in this, nor is my client. We could become involved but are not yet.”
“I suppose I have your word on that?”
“Yes, you do,” she said seriously. “I mean your brother no harm. We, I, thought he was guilty, but you don’t. Fine. Our concern was never about the murder of this fisherman. All I have tried to do is keep you out of danger and keep you from muddying the waters for us.”
“Very noble.”
“All I mean is that I have no additional information about your brother, or whether he is guilty or innocent. I knew he was Ramón’s friend. I am looking for Ramón and thought you might lead me to him, so at odd moments I had you watched, but not followed. Before you told me all this, I thought Tim was part of Ramón’s scheme. Now I think not.”
“Well, we agree on that, at least.”
“I can’t make you leave. I wish I had made you believe that you couldn’t do anything to help Tim. If you insist on continuing to look into this, our paths will cross again. So, I would like to come to an arrangement.”
“Like what?”
“You share what you learn with me and, if I come across any information that relates to the fisherman’s death, I will give it to you.”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“You can’t know,” she said giving me a cheerful smile that mocked my cynicism. “Nor can I know I can trust you. You’ll either do it, trust me that is, or you won’t. That’s what makes it a matter of trust. A person can’t prove their honesty or sincerity a priori, as we lawyers say. So, it becomes an article of faith.”
What she said was all true, and wonderful philosophy, but it didn’t make leaving the coffee shop with so few answers any easier.
The heat outside on the sidewalk didn’t do much to improve my temper. Before I’d walked a block, my shirt stuck to my skin and my jeans felt coarse and heavy. I looked in a few store windows without really seeing anything. My mind kept turning over the little I knew, trying to make some sense of things. At that moment I couldn’t say with any honesty if someone had framed Tim for some particular reason, or if he had just had a public argument with the wrong guy at the wrong time. It was our bad luck that this difference proved an important factor in what I did next.
Was I looking for someone who had a gripe against Tim as well as Antonio? Or was I looking for someone who was an opportunist? And where did Ramón, Tim’s ne’er-do-well sidekick and small-time drug peddler, fit into the killing?
I came out of my reverie long enough to check the traffic light before crossing the street and noticed a car, a shabby brown Cutlass Supreme, well past its prime, gliding along the curb. Suddenly, I remembered seeing the same car outside the coffee shop when I had gone in to meet Victoria, so I took a closer look and saw three men in the car, two in front and one in back.
The usual purple tinting that covers the windows of cars that trek the road from Cumaná to Puerto La Cruz kept me from seeing the man in back clearly, but the two in front looked like bouncers. Both were heavy set and muscular. Both had short, black hair and were clean-shaven. The driver waved at me and turned to say something to the man in back that I couldn’t hear. After a moment, the back door opened, and a thin man with a mustache, dressed in white shirt, tan slacks and shoes smiled out at me.
“Mr. Billings?” he asked. I nodded and waited to see what would happen next. I half expected the El Bruto brothers in the front seats to hop out to try to muscle me into the car. Instead, the thin man just smiled and said, “I’d like to offer you a ride to wherever you are going. We have a matter of mutual interest to discuss.” He said it in such a charming manner that I figured it for an act. But it was a piss-elegant act, and it was too hot to fight. I got in.
“May I call you Martin?” he asked, offering a hand. I took it. He had a firm grip, and he smelled strongly of Bay Rum. I figured he could call me whatever he wanted. He would anyway.
“Sure. What do I call you?”
He smiled pleasantly and then said, “Call me Pancho.”
“Pancho?” I laughed and he did, too.
“I’m sorry, I know it sounds like something from a bad movie, but Pancho Villa is a hero of mine, and I like to use his name,” he said as the car pulled smoothly out into traffic. “Where can we take you?”
“Since you are so obliging, my first choice would be to visit the man who killed the fisherman, Antonio,” I said.
He looked disappointed.
“My second choice would be El Indio.”
Pancho tapped on the seat back. “El Indio,” he said. The driver nodded.
“No luck on my first choice?”
Pancho shrugged. “I could take you to the jail.”
“I've been there. It’s the wrong place. There’s nothing worth finding out there. Even the souvenirs are worthless.”
“But this interests me. You are telling me that it wasn’t your brother who killed the fisherman?”
“Right. I am saying that.” I saw no reason to elaborate. I looked out the window. We were headed for El Indio.
Pancho rubbed his chin. “If that is true, then Ramón must have done it.” He smiled brightly at me, “but it is all the same, still.”
Ramón, again, I thought. “It isn’t the same at all.”
“To me it is. My interest is not in which of them killed some fucking fisherman,” he said sharply, waving the issue away with the back of his hand. “No, what I need to know is what those fools did with my shipment.”
“Your shipment?”
“The one they stole from me.” His eyes grew sad. “You aren’t going to play stupid with me too, Mr. Billings?”
“It’s no game,” I said. “My brother says he doesn’t know what Ramón was up to. I happen to believe him. Maybe that makes me stupid.”
Pancho squinted for a time, keeping his eyes square on mine. I did my best not to blink. “I believe you. I can read your character. I do this well, don’t I, Félix?”
The man in the front seat looked back and smiled. “Si, Señor. Si, Pancho. No one reads the character of men as deeply as you do.”
“Yes,” Pancho went on. “You tell the truth. But your brother, he is different. He’s weaker. Mostly it is out of weakness that men lie, even to a brother. And women,” he laughed. “This is why women lie all the time.” The El Bruto brothers began to laugh loudly. Apparently, the weakness of women was a big joke for them.
The car pulled up at the park in El Indio. “You might tell your brother, for me, that the information he has, produced quickly, could save his life. Held too dear, it will cost him dearly.”
“He didn’t kill the guy,” I said as I got out.
“Coño! I don’t care about that fucking fisherman’s death! Tell him he will rot in jail no matter what, but if he doesn’t tell me where my shipment is, he will die there.” And the car sped off leaving me standing at the Mochima jeep stop.
I breathed deeply for a few minutes, watching the movement of people through the park. Convinced that I was not, for the moment, being watched, I walked down two blocks to Calle Perimetral, where I caught a taxi to the headquarters of PTJ.
Wilfredo was in his office when I got there, bogged down in the normal avalanche of paperwork. He seemed glad to see me.
“We will go for coffee,” he said.
I started to protest. I still had the morning’s multiple coffees sloshing in my stomach but getting away from the office with Wilfredo might make it easier for him to talk.
When we were settled at a table in the coffee shop, I told him of my encounter with Pancho. Wilfredo chuckled. “So, he has added an illegal taxi service to his long list of crimes.”
“You know who he is?”
Wilfredo looked surprised and just a little hurt. “Of course, I know him! I am a policeman in a rather small city, smaller than a city, really, more of a pueblo. I know all of the professional crooks in this area. It is usually only the amateurs that I have to work to find
. Pancho is the head of a fairly big grupo. They traffic in almost everything—women, drugs, whatever people will pay too much for.”
“And you know about his shipment?”
“This is the one I told you about when we first met. I told you Ramón was a mule. We were trailing Ramón in order to get proof that your friend Pancho was involved.” He laughed. “And it appears that before we were able to close in Ramón stole the shipment he was supposed to deliver. This is good. Funny good. You see this man’s hero is not the valiant Mexican hero Pancho Villa, but rather the Columbian drug lords.”
“It’s a shipment of cocaine?”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“It never came up. Just that it was drugs. He thought Ramón and Tim had it, and he wanted it back. He was very adamant about that part.”
Wilfredo put a hand on my arm. “You must be very careful. If he decided you have learned anything specific about his drugs, or his connections, he will do anything to learn what you know. And then he will choose to make certain you cannot pass that information along to me.”
“Yeah. People take that kind of business real seriously.”
“There is something else I must discuss with you.”
“And that is?”
“That you are also a suspect.”
I laughed. “You know I didn’t even come into the country until after you made the arrest.”
“In the murder of your brother’s girlfriend.”
I sat there in shock. I felt I should’ve been protesting or something, but I felt numb. I couldn’t move. Wilfredo just sat there and waited.
After a bit he said, “She was found last night by a neighbor. She’d been treated rather brutally, I’m afraid, and she was no longer so pretty when she died.”
“And you suspect me?”
He lit a cigarette. “No, I said you are a suspect, not that I suspect you. You are officially a suspect because you were seen going into her house yesterday afternoon.” I nodded. That was me, all right. “She was last seen alive around six in the evening when she went to the panadería for some bread.” He stopped. “Can you recall where you were from say four in the afternoon on?”