Sweetheart Deal

by Linda Joffe Hull

  “What have you heard?” he asked.

  “That he was too strong a swimmer to have drowned, for one thing.”

  “Tequila,” he said, repeating a familiar refrain. “She whispers sweet lies.”

  Yeah, I’d heard that one too.

  “Hola,” the driver said as I boarded the bus.

  “No Felipe today?” I asked.

  “Mañana,” the driver said.

  Seeing as everything else had been laid out so systematically, Felipe, who’d already played his role where Alejandro’s death was concerned, had to have been tucked away for a more opportune on-camera moment.

  “Pick up any interesting information from Jorge?” Frank asked as I took my seat on the full bus.

  “Nothing in particular,” I said.

  Since Frank had already drunk the Agua Fresca (or whatever the south-of-the-border equivalent of Kool-Aid was called), there was no point in explaining that nothing had happened beyond Jorge parroting the lines I’d already heard. Clearly he was in on whatever was going on.

  Frank was actually right, though. It was far too twisted to think that Geo, Anastasia, or anyone else would not only have Alejandro killed, but then have the brazen nerve to have us conduct an investigation into their crime.

  Which, as far as I could tell, was exactly why they figured they could get away with it.

  I had to admit the whole thing was sort of brilliant—except for the part where they might actually have killed someone. And that they might then encourage us to implicate an innocent man or woman in a crime he or she hadn’t committed …

  But, other than the boys’ chance run-in with a waiter who’d tipped them off to Alejandro’s aquatic prowess and seeming sobriety, what hard evidence was there for us to zero in on a real, live suspect? Ominous words from the mysterious Sombrero Woman? Zelda’s impassioned ten cuidado (be careful)? The smoothie guy’s warning about sharks? (He was just messing with Trent, right?) There was no reason to believe anything I heard from the rest of my forcefed list of suspects/confidantes, each of whom had a unique spin on Alejandro’s death and even more tenuous thoughts on who could possibly be involved:

  There was Antonio, the heir apparent to the timeshare sales office, whose pointed on-camera mention of the Enrique-Elena-­Alejandro love triangle only served to make him look that much more suspicious.

  Chef Benito, who’d admitted he felt Alejandro was too strong a swimmer to drown, but who was called into question the next day by one of his staff saying he had a temper.

  Enrique, who couldn’t think of any one particular person who might want Alejandro dead.

  Jorge, who I stupidly assumed might be willing to answer a candid question.

  And finally Elena, who, despite her own issues with her husband, couldn’t imagine who would want to kill Alejandro, of all people.

  As we headed toward the water park, Frank made a we’re even happy off-camera show of slipping his arm around my shoulder.

  “I like that bathing suit and cover-up on you,” he said.

  As if on cue, my head began to throb.

  While our driver, who didn’t seem to speak much English, whistled along to Spanish pop music, I closed my eyes and willed myself not to think about the how, why, and what-was-in-store of it all. I focused instead on the low hum of the engine, the balmy mid-morning in coastal Mexico, and the snippets of mundane conversation from the kids, seated in front of me:

  “Do you want to try the zip line or the cliff diving first?”

  “Ivan says—”

  “Does every one of your sentences have to start with Ivan says?”

  “If you’re going to be like that, I’m not going to tell you what he said was the most fun …”

  To my left, I heard giggles followed by a conspicuous silence I assumed had to be from Body and Dave the groomsman.

  “She’s all over him,” one of her sisters confirmed from behind me.

  “Totally.”

  “This time it’s your job to pick up the pieces when it all falls apart.”

  “I say it’s Stasia’s turn.”

  “She’ll still be honeymooning when he stops returning her texts, or whatever it is he does when his vacation fling is over.”

  “Ladies,” said a decidedly louder, distinctly East Coast voice from behind them. “You’re the sisters of the TV bride, right?”

  “We are,” one of them said.

  I turned slightly, opened an eye, and glanced behind me as the older redheaded woman I’d seen various times around the resort peered between their headrests.

  “I’m just curious,” she said. “Did you get your water park tickets for sitting through that timeshare nonsense too?”

  “My sister gave them to us as bridesmaids gifts.”

  “Good for you,” she said. “I was promised two tickets for going to the presentation, but once I said no thanks to a timeshare, they tried to pull a bait-and-switch by giving me miniature golf coupons instead.”

  “Really?”

  “I mean, it’s a shame what happened to the manager, but I have to say, I felt like tossing him in the pool myself,” she said. “All due respect, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, how much did they want you girls to put down for a place?”

  “My husband hashed out the numbers with our salesman while I was in the restroom,” Hair said, “so I don’t know.”

  “I told my salesman that I’m a single mom in the midst of a divorce and I couldn’t begin to think about a down payment on a timeshare until things are finalized,” Face said.

  “And he took no for an answer?”

  “After a while,” Face said with a nervous laugh.

  “They have quite a reputation where hard-selling is concerned,” the redhead went on.

  “Really?” one of the sisters said with disinterest.

  “My salesman asked me what I could afford for a down payment. I gave him such a low number, I figured he’d laugh. Instead, he started crunching numbers to make it work. That’s when I began saying no until he took me seriously.”

  “Glad it worked out for you in the end,” Face said.

  “Listen to this warning from one of the travel sites,” the redheaded woman said, not getting the hint the sisters wanted to be done chatting:

  My husband and I went on vacation to Hacienda de la Fortuna last year. The moment we arrived, we were seated with a private concierge who talked to us about golf, lobster dinners on the beach, and a fantastic water park. When we expressed interest, this concierge told us we could enjoy these excursions and opportunities once we completed the timeshare tour. I explained we had no desire to spend any portion of our vacation listening to timeshare information. She continued to pressure us, became extremely rude, and would not answer many of our questions. Unfortunately, we had to go through her to book any activities we wanted to participate in for the rest of the weekend. Each time, she was rude and had trouble booking the tours we wanted to take. DON’T go to this place if you want a timeshare-free vacation.

  “That’s terrible,” Face said.

  “I mean, our salesperson was kind of out-of-sorts yesterday, but we assumed it was because of the accident,” Hair said.

  “You shouldn’t assume,” the woman said. “Listen to this …”

  I almost felt sorry for the sisters as the woman assaulted them with additional comments from whatever conversation thread she’d Googled.

  There was major pressure to buy right then …

  When we said no, the salesman, our former best buddy, became a bully. He actually said, “So you’re telling me you never plan to travel again?”

  As the woman rambled on and on, the annoyance, stress, and lack of sleep must have gotten to me because I started to feel particularly sleepy. The last thing I heard was, I asked the salesman for his card so my wife and I could think about it and call him back. His response: Visa, Mastercard, or American Express are the only cards I’m interested i
n.

  I opened my eyes a half-hour later to the screech of hydraulic brakes. Momentarily unsure who or where I was, I reentered reality from the midst of one of those jumbled nap dreams in which Geo was urging me to jump into bubbling, churning water.

  ¡Agua caliente! he yelled. ¡Viva la agua caliente!

  22. Tipping plays a significant role in Mexico’s informal, cash-driven economy. Many people leave their hotel maid a daily tip of between $1 and $5 (in pesos, of course) for each night’s stay spent at the hotel.

  23. Including me, in the navy blue crochet-detailed tankini, swim skirt, and coordinating cover-up I’d picked up for a song last August, when stores are most eager to get rid of summer leftovers. Websites also have abundant inventory on sale, if you’re brave enough (or standardly-built enough) to buy a bathing suit online. The second best month to buy a bathing suit is May, when prices drop because shoppers begin to spend more time outdoors and less time at their local retailers.

  sixteen

  Despite waking up to real live Geo standing outside the bus waiting to escort us through the VIP entrance (and wearing green and white tiger-striped swim briefs with a coordinating Family Frugalicious tank top) the water park, quite literally, blew me away.

  Even with the description we’d been given, I still pictured miles of hot concrete and towering pale blue water slides that promised a cheap thrill and an epic water wedgie. Instead of a man-made, kitschy theme park, however, I found myself marveling at majestic beauty that could only be the work of Mother Nature. The lagoon, as Jorge called it, was an enormous inlet of impossibly blue water surrounded by lush jungle. The shark-protection fence on the ocean side (which featured a view that went on for miles) was capped by an expansive floating footbridge connecting the commercial segment of the resort to the activities on the other side.

  “And you can’t even see the walking paths, the animal sanctuary, or all of the smaller inlets,” Geo said, handing out Family Frugalicious tank tops to all of us as well as the various wedding guests who’d come along.

  “Clever,” Frank said, examining the capital Fs that morphed into dollar signs.

  “Think of them as a thank-you gift for the extended duty.”

  Meaning he’d brought them along in anticipation of giving them out to us this morning?

  “We saw a place in town that made up T-shirts and thought they would add a little something special to today’s shoot,” Geo said, seemingly reading my mind. “So put them on. It’s time to get cracking.”

  Wearing our entirely conspicuous tank tops and collecting a growing crowd of gawkers, we ticked off our first scenes and shots, all of which seemed to be geared more toward promoting the water park than looking for who might have information about Alejandro’s demise. Then we worked our way down the day’s call sheet.

  9:30: Orientation turned out to be an informative, if somewhat dry, overview of the habitats, conservation efforts, sustainability, and other related aspects of the park with the head naturalist.

  At 9:50, a camera captured us applying our specially purchased natural sunscreen (a better deal for our family than the $5 per person fee, I explained to the camera,24 plus we’d probably need more sunscreen than I’d packed if our vacation kept being extended by this go-nowhere investigation) and receiving our snorkels, face masks, flippers, and complimentary life jackets.

  Eloise perked up when Ivan arrived, but she was slightly less enthused to discover he was only escorting us for certain unguided portions of the day, and that the 10:05: Group snorkeling adventure included fish.

  Despite Eloise’s general distaste for nonhuman creatures, we proceeded to spend forty-five magical, unimaginably colorful minutes swimming among nearly ninety marine species, including angelfish, parrotfish, snappers, groupers, and puffer fish. With no sign of anything more lethal than Geo in neon swim trunks, Eloise grudgingly agreed with me that the fish were beautiful and I found I began to share Eloise’s impatience about having some alone time with Ivan. After all, I needed her to ask him at least a few of the questions from the list I’d given her so I could figure how he fit into all of this. I wanted to know what Alejandro was really like, whether he drank or not, what was up with his wife and Enrique, and how everyone was reacting to his death when the camera crews weren’t around.

  Not to mention the most important question of all …

  “You know that note Alejandro had you deliver to me?” I managed to whisper on the fly as we headed en masse toward the manatee habitat for our next camera shot.

  “Yup,” Ivan said, shaking water out of his dreadlocks.

  “Did he ask you to deliver notes like that often?”

  “Like, other notes to prospective timeshare owners?”

  “Exactly,” I said, thankful he’d phrased the question so I could answer without blushing.

  “Only once,” he said looking suddenly pensive. “And it was kind of freaky.”

  “How so?”

  “I gave it the woman when her husband was beside her. They read it together and he seemed to get super annoyed.”

  “How so?”

  “Hey, Maddie,” Geo said, sidling up beside us with his usual impeccable timing. “Frank is supposed to feed the manatees in this shot, but he suggested you do it together, which I think is a terrific idea.”

  A better idea would have been to let Ivan answer my question, but since Geo began to walk with us, it was clear that wasn’t going to happen.

  “And Ivan, I need you to head over to the bike rental area and make sure everything is set up for the cycling shoot.”

  “You got it,” Ivan said.

  And other than leaving behind a lingering trace of patchouli, he was off and running.

  Twenty minutes later, Frank and I had been given a quick tutorial by the manatee handler and were busy meeting, feeding, and frolicking in the water alongside the manatee couple as though we were out on some sort of aquatic double date—a date where one couple was mated for life and the other just until their show got canceled … or until someone in charge was arrested for murder.

  There was no way of knowing whether the former or the latter was more likely.

  The group bike tour had us pedaling across the floating footbridge and winding around various inlets through the jungle on a narrow mangrove-lined path. While the excursion was indescribably beautiful and ended with us parking our bikes and clipping in for a heart-pulsing zip line ride from a high cliff, over the water, and back toward the park’s central plaza, the most notable thing that had happened since we’d arrived at the water park was that nothing had happened at all.

  Not sleuthing-wise, anyway.

  Frank had excused himself from the zip line (and his overwhelming fear of heights) by claiming he once again had an urgent need to use the men’s room, but even he seemed somewhat wary about what wasn’t going on as he met up with us at the main restaurant for lunch.

  While I expected pizza, hot dogs, charred burgers, and, if I was lucky, a soggy pre-packaged salad or two, à la an American amusement park, I was delighted to discover yet another elaborate, multistation, internationally themed buffet.

  “No time or need to get in line,” Geo said, leading us toward the camera crew who’d set up around a table that both overlooked the water and was set at the most advantageous lighting angle. “We just had plates made up for you.”

  “I was hoping for tacos today,” Trent said. “I mean, when in Rome and all.”

  Eloise, pouty after being parted from Ivan again, rolled her eyes.

  “No worries,” Geo said. “If you don’t have what you want at the table, we’ll send someone to get it.”

  There were tacos, as well as taquitos, chile rellenos, and everything Mexican we could desire, along with pasta, gyros, fried rice, and cuisine from just about every other country I could think of. And there was way more than even the boys could possibly eat.

  We were seated, the camera clicked on, and we were digging in, when a couple of Phili
p’s law enforcement buddies just happened to chance by.

  Frank gave me a pointed smug look as one of them lifted his glasses and looked over his shoulder as if to check that no one was within eavesdropping distance. (That was, aside from the camera and all the people watching from nearby tables.)

  “We got up early and made a few inquiries with the Federales,” he said, as though he’d been waiting his whole life to deliver such a line.

  “And?” Frank asked.

  “They certainly don’t have the same procedures in place as we do.” The other officer shook his head.

  “Meaning what?” I asked.

  “We tried to talk to someone about reconfirming the cause of Alejandro Espinoza’s death. We asked about witnesses who could have seen or heard anything.”

  “And?”

  “It was weird. No one seemed to want to say there was any possibility other than that he drowned.”

  “We even asked them straight out if a mistake could have been made.”

  “How did they answer?” FJ asked.

  “And I quote: ‘Too much tequila.’”

  “She whispers sweet lies,” I said to myself.

  “Cut,” Geo said, twisting his hair into a man bun. “Great job, but can we do another take without the facial expressions from Frank?”

  I gave Frank a pointed smug look of my own. “Interesting that no one down at the police station will say anything.”

  “We were told not to expect much,” Geo answered.

  “And what about security cameras?” I asked.

  “Not working around that particular pool area,” one of the American officers said.

  “Then we’ll just have to try to confirm things another way, I guess,” I said. “Do you suppose we’ll have an opportunity to do a little more in the way of looking into things today while we’re here?”

  “Maddie, you know we gotta do things in the order that works best for our schedule, not necessarily how life happens,” Geo said.

  Frank nodded in agreement.

  “But don’t worry,” Geo said with a wink. “The day is still young …”

  “And action,” Geo said as we stood in the front of the Dolphin Encounters line waiting for our 1:00: Meet, greet, and ride on what I had to assume were not only one of the most intelligent but also the most patient creatures on the planet.