No Hiding Behind the Potted Palms! A Dance with Danger Mystery #7

by Barton, Sara M.

  “How would that be connected?” Bob didn’t sound like he believed me.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe it’s not. But that was a cruise and this is a cruise.”

  “That’s all you’ve got to go on? Your late husband talked about dumping you in the river and someone tried to toss you overboard last night? Mariem, a lot of guys who get frustrated with their wives often joke about how they would get rid of them.”

  “It was no joke!” I snapped. “He was serious!”

  “Okay. Take a breath. I wasn’t insulting you or trying to minimize the situation. I’m trying to get a handle on what happened and whether it’s a factor in what’s happening to you now. Work with me.”

  Through tear-filled eyes, I looked at the stranger sitting across the room and once again, that sense of lonely desolation came over me, filling my heart with a heaviness that was getting harder and harder to lift.

  “Mariem,” Bob said, more gently this time, “all I’m saying is that there may be a different reason why that incident occurred last night.”

  “Like what?” I demanded.

  “I don’t know,” he acknowledged, standing up. Bob put his hands in his pockets and I could hear the sound of keys jiggling. He seemed restless, moving with a long pacing stride that brought him up short as he covered the confines of the small cabin. “Just think for a moment. Take your time. Was there ever anything, anything at all, that made you think Henri was involved in money-laundering activities?”

  “I found out after he died that the Justice Department was trying to make a deal with him.”

  “Did it go through?”

  “No, not according to Declan.” Bob’s eyes narrowed as he looked out the window of my cabin.

  “Was there anything else?”

  “He took me to Mexico, back in 1997, and I spent time with the mistress of a financier my husband was meeting. She told me she knew a secret. Two hours later, she was dead. Conchita drowned in the pool. I know she’d been drinking, but I don’t think it was an accident.” I recounted the conversation I had with her before I went back to our bedroom in Jaime’s mansion to change out of my wet bathing suit. Conchita believed she had seen Jaime’s right-hand man, Victor Golos, strangle Roberto Morales Rojas, the Mexican congressman, even though it was all over the news that Congressman Morales died in a fiery car crash when he lost control of his sports car going round the La Curva de la Pera, the dangerous bend on the highway from Mexico City to Cuemavaca.

  “Jaime Blandon frightened me. There was something about him.”

  “Jaime Blandon of Banco Pacifico?” Bob was leaning back against the vanity desk, trying to look unruffled, but there seemed to be a tension in him that he was trying hard to hide.

  “You’ve heard of him?”

  “I have. Did you tell Henri about the conversation you had with Conchita?” he asked. I shook my head. “Why not?”

  “I was afraid Jaime would harm her.”

  Bob sat down again and I noticed his demeanor had changed. No longer distant, he focused all of his attention on me.

  “Tell me something, Mariem. After Henri died, did anything unusual happen?”

  “Other than the Prevenue investment going bad? There was an incident at the train station. I was assaulted as I was leaving. The police said it was a routine mugging. Before I could heal from that, a car collided with mine on my way to my sister’s house in Maryland.”

  “Were you seriously injured?” the former Treasury agent demanded, with a sense of urgency.

  “I saw the car coming up behind me and I swerved at the last minute. It was mostly bumps and bruises, but it shook me up. That’s when Declan told me I would be safe if I married him.”

  “Really? He said that to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And now there is a CPA pretending to be someone else and asking you out for a drink, even though he has a very pregnant wife and kids with him on the Beauty of the Seas. This comes on the heels of someone trying to kill you last night. As Shakespeare would point out, something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.” Bob summed up the situation succinctly.

  “Can I tell you something?” I asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  “This may sound odd, but I’ve always had my doubts about Henri’s financial dealings. When I shared my concerns with Declan, he kept telling me that people would assume I was another Ruth Madoff. He said people would think I was always a part of it, so I should be quiet and let him deal with it. But now it seems like things have gotten out of hand. I’m beginning to think that staying quiet wasn’t a good thing.”

  “Tell me about your fiancé.”

  Over the next half hour, Bob asked a lot of questions and I answered them as best I could. And then I told him of my decision.

  “I can’t marry Declan.”

  “Because?”

  I took a deep breath and let it play inside my lungs, bouncing around before exiting. I exhaled slowly, carefully, before answering.

  “Because I’ve come to believe that Declan’s only interest in me has to do with protecting Henri’s terrible secrets from becoming public.”

  “You don’t think he loves you?” Bob gave me a slight smile. “Mariem, you are a beautiful woman. Most men would find you irresistible. Why do you think Declan doesn’t worship the ground upon which you walk?”

  I scratched my cheek as I pondered the question. I thought about the many times we spent together. And then I found the missing piece of the puzzle.

  “It’s always about Henri. My late husband is the common bond between us. Conversations are always about Henri, not about us. It’s as if we would not exist if I had not been married to the late Henri Dufours. Does that make any sense to you?” Even as I said those words, I realized the veracity of them. It felt as if I was reaching deep inside myself and grasping the illusive shadows that had plagued my life since Henri died. Declan Dowd was only interested in me as Henri’s lawyer. The romance had nothing to do with me as a woman. Once that came into my conscious mind, I knew there was no going back. I would have to see this through until the end, even if the end wasn’t neat and tidy.

  “Well,” Bob sighed. “You’ve certainly given me a lot to think about. And now it’s going on eleven. I think you should take some time and relax at the pool. From what you’ve told me, I suspect that Steve Kablinski is likely to seek you out. I just want you to know one thing, Mariem Dufours. I’m going to get to the bottom of this mess. Don’t you worry.”

  “What if Henri was really a bad man and I never knew it?” That was a question that had worried me for the last few years, especially after Conchita’s death.

  “What if he was?” Bob stood up, his matter-of-fact words feeling like a slap across the face.

  “My life has been a fraud.” I wanted to see something in those mahogany eyes, something that would assuage the guilt I felt for having married a man I now believed had been evil. But Bob didn’t help me with that. If anything, he made me feel worse.

  “You’re not trained as a financial genius. You’re not trained as an investigator. You are what you are.”

  “Stupid?”

  “No.” Bob patted my arm awkwardly. “Not stupid, Mariem. Naive. I suspect that Henri had to work hard to keep you in the dark. Maybe that’s why he always deflected attention away from his business deals and back onto you, making you feel inadequate and insecure. You turned out to be too smart and too ethical.”

  “But what if he was a money launderer?” It was a relief to finally say those words to someone who wasn’t interested in protecting Henri’s memory.

  “What if he was?”

  “Maybe that was a reason that Prevenue failed.”

  “I don’t follow you,” Bob admitted. “Why do you think there’s a connection?”

  “Because every time I tried to get Maura to explain what she was doing with my insurance money, it felt a lot like what Declan did whenever I talked about Henri’s business deals.”

&nb
sp; “They both distracted you to protect Henri?” As soon as he said that, I knew that was my fear. Maybe I allowed them to lead me astray because I was afraid to find out the truth

  “What if it was some kind of Ponzi scheme, to defraud clients of Grenois Financial? What if hard-working people lost money on Prevenue because the cartel wanted to punish me for Henri’s decision to cooperate with the grand jury?”

  “Let me give you a very important piece of advice, Mariem. You are not Henri. You are not responsible for what Henri did. Even if you had concerns, you never had any actual proof that he committed any crimes, did you?” Bob’s strong hands gripped my shoulders and he leaned his face close to mine.

  “No,” I sighed, frustrated that Henri’s business always remained in the shadows of our marriage. It made it that much harder to leave him.

  “All the suspicions in the world are not enough to convict someone. You need proof. You need evidence. If you’ve got any, I’m more than happy to review it. But if all you have is guilt, fear, and suspicions, take yourself off the hook. If Henri really was laundering money for drug cartels, he went out of his way to keep you out of it. Either he loved you and did it to protect you, which makes him a wise man, or he used you for cover, which makes him a fool. Either way, Henri was the wrong man for you. You deserve better. You have a conscience and that’s a good thing, but now put some perspective to the equation. Henri and his friends hid things from you, probably not because they cared about you, but because they cared about not getting caught.”

  Chapter Five —

  “I’ve got to get going. We’ve got a couple of pickpockets on the ship and they’re working the passengers. They get busy with the lunch bunch,” Bob announced, squeezing my hand. He gave me an encouraging smile. “We’ll meet up again later and talk some more. In the meantime, we’re keeping an eye out for you, so just enjoy the cruise, okay? If you get the chance, can you give Steve Kablinski a chance to reveal why he’s so interested in you?”

  “I can.” It was true. I had an ally on the Beauty of the Seas. Suddenly all things seemed possible.

  In the time since Henri’s death, and even long before, I had felt like a tiny boat adrift in a big, unruly sea, victim of choppy waters, unable to chart a course because I knew not how to navigate. There was something about Bob that made me believe my instincts had not been wrong, only my decisions. My doubts about Henri had often been squashed by the power and intensity of my husband’s personality. I had put myself aside so many times because I had been intimidated by Henri’s anger. Bob didn’t seem to find my concerns unreasonable. He didn’t treat me as a fanciful woman, prone to attacks of imagination. He considered my words and tried to decide if they made sense. Somewhere in the middle of our conversation, I found the woman I had been before that fateful day on the Paris metro, but she was older now and much wiser.

  The sun was hiding behind a smattering of rain clouds when I arrived in the Sanctuary, an intimate indoor pool area reserved for adults, tucked away on the lido deck. The sunroof was closed to the sky, but the pool was open and there were a handful of bathers scattered around it. I put my tote bag down beside an empty lounge chair and headed to the water, to check the temperature. Warm on my skin, it felt good. Swimming had always been one of my favorite activities. Growing up, my mother had always called me her water baby. There was something therapeutic about floating in water, and I had every intention of taking advantage of the opportunity.

  I went back to my lounge chair and pulled out my new copy of “Till Death Do Us Part”, John Ransom Brody’s latest novel about art critic Harry Munsen. I had read the other two in the series and was looking forward to the latest adventures of the debonair amateur sleuth. This time, the subject was the heist at the Orchard Museum, where three Impressionist masterpieces were snatched from their frames in the middle of a tour by armed men in masks. It was pure escapism, and now, in the daylight hours, while I was surrounded by fellow passengers and attendants, I was not afraid to read it.

  So wrapped up in the story was I that I lost track of time. When I had read five chapters, I forced myself to stretch and take a swim break. With my room card tucked into my paperback as a bookmark, I laid it down on the small side table. My tote bag was sitting on the cement floor, out of the way, with a bottle of spring water, a small packet of tissues, some sunscreen, and my little makeup case, all the typical things a woman like me brings to a pool. There was nothing unusual about any of the items, nothing mysterious. That’s why, when I returned from my swim, I was shocked to see that the tote bag had disappeared. And then I remembered what Bob had said about the pickpockets.

  “You’ve got to be joking!” I exclaimed with exasperation.

  “Miss?” A pool attendant hurried over.

  “Someone snatched my tote bag!” I thought about the contents. There wasn’t much I couldn’t purchase once we got to Bermuda, but I hated the idea of walking around a luxury cruise ship without makeup. “Damn!”

  “I will notify security,” the attendant promised. Sure enough, a few minutes later, a uniformed man in a crisp white shirt, tie, and black slacks, with a name tag that said “Bufumo”, walked through the automatic doors and up to the now-nervous attendant, who pointed to me.

  “You reported your tote bag is missing?” said the man with a craggy face who looked anywhere from fifty to sixty. He wore frameless glasses perched on his nose and a tiny American flag on his shirt pocket.

  “Yes,” I told him. He asked for a description of the bag and its contents. “Let’s see. It’s a Monet bag from the Louvre, with a scene of red poppies in a field.”

  “In other words, it’s distinctive?”

  “I guess you could say that. I don’t think you can buy one like it in the States, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That is what I mean. But you still have your room key?” I nodded. “Could you just make sure, please?”

  I flipped open my book to the last page of Chapter Eight. There was a room card there, but it was for Cabin 657A.

  “This isn’t mine,” I declared. “I’m in Room 819!” I handed the card to the man, who examined one side of it and then the other.

  “Well, ain’t that a kick in the seat of the pants.” Mr. Bufumo picked up his radio and spoke into it, using a lot of phases I didn’t understand. When he finished, he asked me to accompany him to the security office, to fill out a report. I slipped back into my gauzy beach cover-up and sandals, suddenly self-conscious about showing so much skin away from the Sanctuary. I was going to ask if I could stop at my cabin and change first, until I realized I could no longer get into my cabin. With a shrug, I followed Mr. Bufumo, my fingers tightly clenching “Until Death Do Us Part”.

  “This doesn’t seem like just an ordinary theft,” I offered, making conversation with the taciturn man’s unresponsive back. He grunted something in return. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s not. Someone was watching you.”

  “How do you know that?” I wondered.

  “Your room key’s gone.”

  “So?” We were entering the employees-only maze of passageways.

  “How did the thief know to take your bookmark unless he was watching you? And why replace it with a different room key?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. I thought about that.

  “It was a trap, kiddo. You were supposed to confront the passenger in Cabin 657A.”

  Bob was waiting for us in one of the larger cubicles. We sat at a long table in wooden arm chairs with casters.

  “I don’t understand,” I told the security man as he grabbed his notepad and a pen from the desk behind the table. “Why was it a trap? What is so special about Cabin 657A? Why would the thief expect me to go to that room?”

  “Because he left you a message you didn’t get.” Bob took the card from Mr. Bufumo. He looked at it closely before handing it over to me.

  “Notice anything?” he asked me. I peered down at the tropical design of the card. I could see the room nu
mber printed on the front. Flipping it over, I saw the handwritten message in permanent black marker.

  “‘Meet me in the room if you want to know about Henri.’” I read those words and felt an unexpected chill. “Mr. Bufumo said it was a trap.”

  “It was. Do you know what’s special about Cabin 657A, Mariem?”

  “No.”

  “It’s one of the few unoccupied cabins we have on this cruise and it just happens to have a balcony. It looks like the man who attacked you last night is determined to finish the job before we reach Bermuda.” No longer was Bob trying to reassure me that everything was under control. His face was grim. That’s when it dawned on me.

  “How did he get a hold of that room key?” I asked, already dreading the answer.

  “Probably the same way he avoided showing up on the security camera in the Sanctuary. He’s a professional and he knows our security arrangements.”

  “A professional what?” Neither Bob nor Mr. Bufumo answered that question. Stunned by the news, I sat in the chair, wondering why someone was going to so much trouble to get at me. When I voiced that thought, Mr. Bufumo spoke.

  “Funny, we were wondering the same thing. If I didn’t know you were a widow, I’d think your husband did it.”

  “Angelo was a homicide detective in St. Louis for fifteen years,” Bob explained. “He always thinks it’s an inside job.”

  “Spouses are always trying to whack each other,” he shrugged. “It’s the nature of the beast. Did your husband have a mistress?”

  The question hit me hard, in the gut, like an unexpected punch from a prizefighter. I sucked in a breath as the emotional blow landed.

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it.” The idea of Henri having another woman in his life was a concept I had never confronted. Looking back, there had never been any reason to suspect he was having an affair. There were only business calls late at night. I never came upon him whispering romantic things into the receiver. If anything, Henri was probably the least romantic Frenchman alive. He was cold, unemotional, and uninterested in other people’s feelings.