Sons of Sparta: A Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis Mystery

by Jeffrey Siger

  “You’re a genius, Maggie.”

  “I know. But thank you, anyway.”

  “Is the chief around?”

  “I’ll get him for you.”

  Kouros pulled off the road just above a renovated, centuries-old, four-story tower. A large, modern wooden deck at the rear of the stone tower overlooked the sea. Traditionalists must have gone wild, but whoever built the place had obviously turned a wreck into a home, and brought new blood—and money—to the Mani. That’s what things were all about these days. He turned off the motor and waited.

  “Yianni, how are you?”

  “Alive, but barely.”

  “What’s up?”

  Yianni told Andreas about his cousin’s request for a second look at the autopsy, the cast of characters he’d met yesterday, and his run-in with Babis.

  “Aren’t you the lucky bastard to be in the wrong place at the right time?” said Andreas. “I sure hope your little flirtation was worth it.”

  “I’ll let you know when I can feel my balls again.”

  Andreas laughed. “Do you still think your uncle was murdered?”

  “Don’t know yet. If the autopsy doesn’t find something, I’ll be heading home. No reason to stir up my cousins on a hunch.”

  “What about the death threats in his newspaper and that phone text?”

  Kouros shook his head. “I know it’s hard to believe it was all coincidence, but without any proof of foul play, what else could it be?”

  “Mani voodoo? What about the guy you just tangled with? Sounds like he had a motive.”

  “I have the feeling I’m not the first guy in the taverna to hold hands with his girlfriend. He could be angry with a whole lot of people. I’ll have Maggie run him through the computer and see what she comes up with.”

  “Well, do what you have to do. No need to hurry back on my account. That Crete thing with Orestes is now on wait-and-see status.”

  “What happened?”

  Andreas told him.

  “He’s going to be pissed when he finds out about the subpoenas.”

  “I certainly hope so. All that thought and effort deserves some reward.”

  Kouros laughed. “Could you patch me back to Maggie? I want to give her that guy’s name.”

  “Just tell me, and I’ll get her to cut through all the red tape for you.”

  “Thanks, Chief.”

  “No problem. Your balls have been busted enough for one day.”

  ***

  Andreas personally passed along Kouros’ request for a STAT criminal background check on the taverna owner. He also called GADA’s techies and pressed them to expedite their review of Uncle’s autopsy, though he knew Maggie’s calls likely carried more weight. Certainly more fear. If you crossed Maggie, her network of strategically placed support staff would make your life miserable. Pathologically disorganized desk jockeys found their haystacks of paper scrupulously organized into neat piles impossible for them to fathom, and the neat found clutter mysteriously accumulating in every corner. And that was just for starters.

  “Chief?”

  Andreas pressed the intercom button. “Yes, Maggie?”

  “Your friend, Petro, stopped by. He said to tell you that Orestes never showed up at the club last night.”

  He paused. “The next time Petro stops by, send him in to see me.”

  “Do you want me to find him?”

  “No. Not necessary.” At least not yet, he thought. But if Orestes starts making himself scarce, it would call for new tactics. Andreas needed to know what the bastard was up to.

  Especially after it started raining subpoenas on Crete.

  ***

  Kouros’ conversation with the minimarket owner was akin to having one with a radio. All Kouros got to say was, “Hello,” and the owner was off and running. He said he recognized Kouros from the funeral and spent the next fifteen minutes raving about how much he’d admired his uncle and considered it his honor to drop off Uncle’s newspaper each morning at the taverna “fresh out of the stack of papers” he picked up each morning from the distributor. At least that nailed down one point for Kouros: The death threat must have been put into the paper at the taverna. No one up to that point knew which paper in the stack would end up in front of Uncle. Yes, it was possible the minimarket guy did it, but that seemed even more unlikely than someone putting the same message into every newspaper in the stack.

  Kouros tried thinking of some gracious way to escape the owner’s clutches when a message came through on his mobile from Maggie: CHIEF TOLD ME WHAT HAPPENED. HERE’S BALL BUSTER’S RAP SHEET. HOPE YOU’RE FEELING BETTER…OR AT LEAST FEELING SOMETHING :-)

  I’ll never hear the end of this, Kouros thought. As he waited for the document to download, he pointed at the phone, smiled at the owner, and said, “Sorry, I have to take this.”

  The man nodded and quickly pounced on another customer.

  Kouros wandered over to his car. It took a minute for the document to show up on his screen. It was a three-page report dealing with crimes of the sort that gave Babis’ hometown a bad name throughout the rest of Greece. From childhood, he’d been in trouble. First for breaking into tourists’ hotel rooms, and later for robbing them face-to-face. By the time he was old enough to qualify for adult jail time, he’d gone into a different line of work, capitalizing on his hometown area’s fertile cropland. Not as an agricultural laborer, but as a supervisor, or more appropriately for how he was expected to treat those under his watch, slave overseer.

  Immigrants worked for slave wages harvesting by hand backbreaking crops like strawberries, and when a supervisor could steal from them he would. Babis’ job in that line of work made his rap sheet because he’d been one of several supervisors suspected—but never proven—to have shotgunned a group of Pakistani laborers protesting over six months of unpaid back wages.

  In his personal life, twice he’d been arrested for badly beating up a Polish girlfriend who’d left him. The first time, she refused to press charges. The second time she did but never appeared at his trial to testify. And no one had seen her since.

  Nice guy, thought Kouros. I should have kicked the shit out of him when I had the chance.

  The last entry was an arrest six years ago for growing marijuana hidden among rows of spinach-like horta. In that part of Greece and a few other places, that sort of cash crop farming practice wasn’t uncommon, and viewed much like “moonshining” in the United States. Babis’ drug charges were dropped and from that point on he had a clean record.

  Not so much as a parking ticket since he’d relocated to the Mani.

  ***

  Kouros walked through the front door of the taverna, past a startled Stella, and stopped just outside the kitchen. “Babis, come out here. Don’t worry, all is forgiven. I’m not even calling you ‘asshole.’”

  There wasn’t a sound in the kitchen. Kouros turned to Stella and mouthed, “Is he in there?”

  She nodded.

  “Babis come out. I only want to talk. Now play nice.”

  He heard metal against metal, and saw Babis wiping his hands on an apron as he walked toward him. “I have cooking to do.”

  “It won’t take long.” He turned to Stella. “Would you excuse us, please?”

  Babis jerked his head in the direction of the front door. “Outside.” He sat down.

  Kouros sat across from him. “I’ve seen your rap sheet—”

  “That’s all in the past. I’m clean.”

  Kouros nodded. “I know, but I want to know how you found religion?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You went from bad boy to model citizen overnight. Why?”

  “I grew up.”

  “I think you mean you were scared shitless.”

  Babis shifted in his chair.

 
; “You faced a long stretch in prison on your last arrest. Yet you walked. Must have been divine intervention that saved your ass.”

  Babis shrugged. “Think what you want.”

  “I checked. You walked on your last arrest, but the owner of the property didn’t. He got six years.”

  Babis shrugged again. “He deserved it.”

  Kouros shook his finger at him. “I’m not so sure about that, my friend. You see, that property owner was a very prominent piece of garbage in your hometown. He had his finger in just about every illegal scheme in the northwest Peloponnese. His farms were used to launder money, not make it. Everybody knew that, but no one could prove it. He was too smart and too cagey.”

  Babis looked at the floor.

  “Hard to imagine that this same guy would be growing hash in the middle of a field owned in his real name. The DEA would have had to be blind not to find it in a flyover. He was practically inviting the DEA to catch him.”

  Kouros leaned in to within six inches of Babis’ face. “You know what I think? I think there’s no way an operator like that would ever be stupid enough to grow that shit on his own property.” Kouros paused. “No way.”

  Babis shrugged.

  Kouros sat back in his chair. “My guess is he was set up. I doubt he even knew there was grass growing out in the middle of all that horta. But you did. Probably even planted it. And when DEA found it, you made a deal to give them the owner. They got to nail a bad guy they’d wanted for years, and you got to walk away clean. Everyone’s happy, except of course for the guy who went to prison. Does he still call you on your name day?”

  “He’s dead. Died of a heart attack, two years ago in prison.”

  Kouros nodded. “Convenient. What about his family? Have they forgotten about what you did to their father?”

  Babis stared at the floor.

  “Somehow I don’t see you hanging around this place because you think they don’t know you’re here. If I’d crossed someone as powerful as that guy, I’d have moved to some place like China long ago.” Kouros shook his head. “So, tell me, Babis, what keeps you here?”

  “Why should I tell you?”

  “Because I’m pretty sure I already know the answer to that question. I just want to know why. And if you don’t tell me, I might just have to visit your old stomping grounds and start poking around for answers. I’d hate to open old wounds, but you’re leaving me no choice.”

  Babis started running his hands through his hair, but abruptly switched to rubbing them furiously on his thighs. The textbook example of a suspect about to turn violent.

  “Uh, uh,” said Kouros. “Don’t go there. Just answer my question so we can end this interview and you can get back to going about your business. But if you go crazy on me again, I promise you’ll be back in jail. After you get out of the hospital.”

  Babis took his hands off his thighs to hold his head, elbows on the table. “The DEA guys gave me no choice. They had me cold on the drug charge and a whole lot of other things that could put me away for twenty years.” He got up, went over to a cooler, pulled out a beer, and snapped it open.

  “What choice did I have?”

  “What happened?”

  Babis chugged the beer, took another from the cooler, and came back to the table. “I testified, the DEA got its conviction, the owner went away, and I moved here. End of story.”

  “So why are you still breathing?”

  “You already guessed it. Your uncle had me under his protection.”

  “Which leads to my ‘why’ question.”

  “He felt he owed me.”

  “Owed you?”

  Babis popped opened the second beer. “I was growing the grass for him.”

  Son of a bitch, thought Kouros. Uncle was lying when he said he was out of the business.

  “You can’t grow grass around here and your uncle offered me a lot of money to do it for him up there.”

  “But why did you pick that guy’s property?”

  Babis’ took a sip of the beer. “That’s where your uncle told me to grow it. I told him there were a lot safer places to do it, but he insisted I grow it there.”

  “Any idea why he made you do it there?”

  “Not when he asked me, but I pretty much figured all that out later. He had a hard-on for the guy. The owner double-crossed your uncle in some business deal years before and your uncle never forgave him. I don’t think your uncle ever intended to take delivery of the grass. He just wanted to fuck the landowner. And did he ever. I’m sure he’s the one who tipped off the DEA, too.”

  Son of a bitch, thought Kouros suppressing a smile. Uncle was just settling a score. Never cross a Maniot. “But he fucked you, too.”

  Babis shrugged. “He paid me what he promised, and protected me ever since. Even set me up in this business. I’m very grateful for all your uncle did for me.”

  “I come back to what I said before, now that my uncle’s dead, what’s to prevent the landowner’s family from coming after you?”

  “They’re not vendetta-crazy like you people from the Mani. Your uncle’s dead. He’s the one who set everybody up. That should end it.”

  “Sounds like you’re praying.”

  Babis drained the rest of the beer. “I have to prepare for my lunch customers. Are we done?”

  “For now.” Kouros stood and headed toward the door, passing Stella coming back inside.

  “Hurry back,” she whispered.

  He sensed she was right about that.

  ***

  Something’s not right. Kouros left the taverna and drove south toward Cape Tenaro along a winding mountain road filled with hundreds of domesticated goats herded by a single dog, all of them acting as if the road were theirs alone. But his mind wasn’t on the goats, the dog, or the scenery. He had to think. Kouros squeezed the steering wheel and gritted his teeth. “He’s the one who set everybody up,” kept running through his mind.

  That didn’t sound like someone “grateful” for what Uncle had done for him. It was more like a man bearing a deep grudge. For six years Babis had run a taverna on the ass end of the Peloponnese, far away from the action he was used to up north. And every day of those six years he’d had to serve coffee to the guy who put him there. Babis would have been better off serving his time in prison. With prison overcrowding what it was, he’d probably be out by now, even with a twenty-year sentence.

  Babis certainly had reason for a grudge. But was it a big enough one to risk murdering his protector? Babis was full of shit about Uncle’s death ending the Pirgos family’s desire to come after him for their father’s death. They’d go after him the moment they knew he’d lost Uncle’ s protection. Maybe Babis was banking on Mangas’ protection? Could be. He’d likely honor his father’s commitments. But if the autopsy showed Uncle was murdered, that family up north would be the least of Babis’ problems. He’d spend the rest of his days looking over his shoulder worrying whether one of Uncle’s children might someday think Babis had something to do with their father’s murder. And why the death threat notes? Kouros smacked the steering wheel.

  Something’s definitely not right.

  Chapter Ten

  Maggie opened the door to Andreas’ office. “Chief?”

  Andreas looked at his watch. “Why are you still here?”

  “Curiosity.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. Curious about what?”

  She walked over to his desk and handed him a large flat envelope. “It’s our techies’ take on the autopsy of Yianni’s uncle. They called to tell me it was on the way, so I waited.”

  “That was fast.”

  She smiled. “Someone lit a fire under them and they did the same to the local guy who performed the autopsy.”

  “So, what’s it say?”

  “Chief, I don’t open your mail.�
��

  “Right. I forgot. It arrives that way from the mail room.”

  Maggie shrugged.

  Andreas unwound a string holding the cover flap closed, slid out a document, leaned back in his chair, and began to read.

  Maggie sat across from him.

  The first page recited all the customary exculpatory language to the effect that the author’s conclusions were based solely upon data provided by someone else so that if the data were in error the conclusions might change.

  He slid the first page across the desk to Maggie and started reading the second. Halfway down the page he sat up in his chair. “Jesus.”

  “What is it?”

  Andreas held up the page and pointed with a pencil to four words. CONCLUSION: DEATH BY POISON.

  “My God. Yianni was right. His uncle was murdered.”

  Andreas went back to reading the report. He finished and slid the pages across the desk to Maggie.

  “This technical stuff is all Chinese to me, Chief. What does it mean?”

  Andreas tapped his pencil on his desk. “If the report is correct, his uncle died from exposure to an exotic poison lethal to the touch that rapidly brings on a massive heart attack in an otherwise healthy individual. According to the victim’s medical history, his heart was sound and asymptomatic for heart disease or any other suspect cause for such a natural death.”

  Andreas leaned forward and with the eraser end of the pencil drew the report back to him. He looked at the second page. “According to a blood analysis done by the local coroner, there were traces of markers to the poison. Not of the poison itself, because it breaks down rapidly, but of the byproducts of its disintegration. We got a break with a quick autopsy, otherwise all evidence of the poison would have disappeared.”

  “Doesn’t sound like the local coroner was involved in a cover-up.”

  Andreas nodded. “My guess is once he found signs of a massive heart attack, he took that for the cause and didn’t bother to look any further. But even if he had, picking up on this poison would require sophisticated forensics skills I doubt he had. Even our guys couldn’t tell how the poison was administered.”