by Don Travis
I dug my notebook from a shirt pocket and gave her a number. “Hazel, ask Gene to call a Miss Penny in the CEO’s office at Halversack Wine Distributers and ask who rescheduled Marc Juisson’s meeting with their VP. A lieutenant from APD ought to be able to get that information from her. She was reluctant to give it to me.”
“They’re liable to check with the Lovely Pines about our inquiry,” she warned.
“Good. Just make sure Charlie’s at the chateau before Gene makes the California call. And tell Charlie not to say anything about what’s happened down here in Carlsbad.”
I closed the call and got into the driver’s seat of my rental. I hadn’t gone a block before something cold and hard and round pressed into the back of my head.
“Keep driving.”
“I’m getting sloppy,” I said, fighting to keep my leaping heart from clogging my throat. “I never thought to check the back floorboard of my car. Of course, I usually keep the car locked. Guess the excitement of the moment distracted me.” Was I babbling out of fear or seeking to calm him down? I didn’t know.
“Shut up. Take the next right and find a way out of town. No freeways. Just a quiet street that leads us to someplace private.”
I pressed the accelerator slightly. “Don’t think I want to do that.”
He dug the gun barrel into my flesh. “Do it! And slow down.”
“Don’t think I want to do that either.” I pressed the gas pedal harder and blew through a red traffic light, causing two cars to skid to a halt, horns blaring. “Next light’s coming up in about six blocks. Hand over the gun, Marc. You’re not cut out for this business.”
“Slow down!” he yelled and whacked me in the head with the pistol hard enough to send my eyesight blurring.
The car went into a skid, heading for the curb on the opposite side of the street. I made no effort to correct it. I simply threw myself sideways as far as the shoulder restraint belt would permit and tried to relax. Easier said than done.
The vehicle hit the curb going virtually sideways and flipped. My head banged on the steering wheel, and I fought desperately to avoid losing consciousness. I know we rolled once and probably would have again if we hadn’t broadsided a tree. That finished it for me. I went black.
I CAME semiawake at the sound of noises. Banging on metal. Excited voices. The thought of Marc Juisson brought me back from la-la land in a hurry. My head throbbed, but all my various parts seemed to work—except the knee I’d wrenched falling down the stairs. But I was constricted, unable to move freely. After a longer period of time than it should have taken, I figured out I was still strapped into the seat belt. I managed to hit the release button, which freed me to fall a few inches. The halt was painful. That’s when I figured out the car was lying on its side. The sound that had brought me conscious was someone prying the front passenger’s door open. Even as I slowly rounded on that fact, it came free with a screech of tortured metal. An indistinct face peered down at me, haloed like an angel by the bright light outside.
“You okay, fella?” a voice asked.
“Need some help getting out, but think I’m okay. But the other man in the car—back there somewhere, he’s a criminal with a gun. Wait for police, but don’t let him escape.”
Ignoring me, the man disappeared for a moment. I heard the crash of glass as he punched out the window to the back door. A moment later, he reappeared and lowered himself into the front of the cabin.
“Don’t worry about him. He ain’t gonna give nobody no trouble. Shoulda wore a seat belt.”
Epilogue
GENE ENRIQUEZ helped me out of the front seat of Charlie’s car in the parking lot of the Lovely Pines late the next afternoon. Roma Muñoz and a deputy pulled in beside us and exited their vehicle. The four of them surrounded me as I slowly made my way to the front door of the chateau, aided by a walnut cane with a shiny brass duck’s head as a knob. The verdict on my knee was still out—one specialist wanted to operate; another counseled waiting. I planned to go with the second opinion. Other than the knee, I was in decent shape. A knot on the head, glass cuts on a shoulder. Sore as hell all over. Nothing I couldn’t handle. I was in a hell of a lot better shape than Marc Juisson, who was lying in the OMI’s morgue with several broken bones… one of them being a vertebra in his neck.
As soon as we came through the door, Heléne Benoir slipped from behind the chocolatier’s stand and rushed to meet us. After assuring herself I was fitter than I appeared, she ushered us into the sitting room, where the Gondas awaited our arrival. Both stood as we entered.
Gonda took an involuntary step toward us but caught himself. “BJ, are you all right?”
“Fine, thank you. Bum knee and a bruised forehead.”
“And a cut or two where it doesn’t show,” Charlie volunteered.
“Sit down, sit down!” Gonda rushed to fill coffee cups from an urn set on a table at the end of the two facing couches.
I examined Margot as we greeted one another across the space of a broad coffee table. She was carefully made up, but signs of stress—or sorrow—leaked through.
Following a tussle with Roma, who clearly wanted this to be her show, we’d earlier agreed I would start the meeting by relating what happened in Carlsbad the day before. I did so in excruciating detail. Everyone listened to my narrative without interrupting, except for Gonda’s question as to whether little David was all right after the rough treatment he received.
Once I was finished, the room fell silent. An old-fashioned French pendulum clock sitting on a sideboard at the end of the room provided the only sound.
Gonda broke the stillness. “So it is all finished now? It is over? Marc killed my son?”
Roma handled that one. “We believe so, Mr. Gonda.”
“But why?” His question came out with a sob.
Roma hewed to the line we agreed to. “Because Juisson knew you well enough to understand you would acknowledge Zuniga. He would have become an heir.”
“But there is enough for everyone. There is—” He stumbled over his words. “—enough for everyone.”
“Apparently not.”
“Thank God my grandson is safe.”
“Is he?” Roma asked.
“Of course he is! Marc is dead.” Ariel Gonda gasped. He flinched. “Are you saying someone else is involved?”
I walked all over Roma’s territory at that point. “Margot, why did you change Marc’s appointment with the wine distributor from today to tomorrow?”
Gonda’s features grew mottled. He appeared to be holding his breath as he looked at his wife of twenty-odd years.
Margot seemed startled as well. “Because Marc asked me to.”
“Did he give a reason why?”
She colored slightly. “He arranged to meet a woman he knew while he was there. Someone from Switzerland. He told me she had a scheduling conflict, so he wanted a delay of the meeting by twenty-four hours.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, my dear?”
She reached over and patted Gonda’s hand. “Why? Halversack expressed no problem with the rescheduling. If they had, I would have told him to stick with the original timing.”
Gonda sighed as if it came from his soul. “I see.”
“We found the young lady’s name and number in your nephew’s diary. She confirms his story,” Roma said.
I broke in again. “How were you to let Marc know if the change was unacceptable? Halversack says the change was made yesterday morning. In fact, just before we met.” I nodded to Gene. “Lieutenant Enriquez confirmed that for us. That is why he is present this morning.”
Margot now had the look of a careful adversary. I was rapidly making myself unwelcome in the Gonda home, I suspected. “By calling Marc on his cell phone, of course,” she replied.
“But you didn’t have his new cell number. It got me a grocery store in the South Valley.”
“But I did not know this at the time. I did not realize I wrote it down wrong.”
; “His old cell phone still works, and that is the only cell we found on him. There was not a new one.”
Gonda could no longer contain himself. “He apparently deliberately misinformed my wife. As a ruse to be out of touch—incommunicado until it suited him to return to the fold.”
“What rational reason would he give her for such a mistake when it came to light?”
Gonda fluttered both hands before his face, which turned into the beard-smoothing gesture. “Must we consider Marc a rational man thinking reasonable thoughts? Killing my son and attempting to kidnap my grandson are not the acts of a rational man.”
“Perhaps he would have gotten a new phone upon his return and provided me with that number, saying he made a mistake,” Margot suggested. “After all, his plans were rushed. We only recently learned where the child was, you know.”
“Possible,” I said, although I wasn’t so sure of that.
“Let us return to what is paramount in my mind,” Gonda said. “You are certain Marc killed my son, Bascomb Zuniga?”
“I cannot tell you we could prove it to a jury,” Roma said, “but the preponderance of evidence we have collected tells me he was the murderer.”
“How is that possible?” Margot asked. “BJ told us he confirmed Marc’s absence on another California sales trip on the night of Bas’s death.”
Gene spoke up. “It is not a crime to lie to a private investigator, Mrs. Gonda. But it is a different matter when you speak to a police authority. I rechecked Mr. Juisson’s story. He was there, all right—with the same young lady, as a matter of fact. But upon questioning by Los Angeles city detectives, she acknowledged she remained alone in their hotel room one night while he left a day early to take care of some business, asking her to keep it confidential.”
Gonda sucked air through his teeth. “And that was the night Bas died?”
“I’m afraid so,” Gene concluded. “You will recall that he claimed to have arrived the day of the discovery of Mr. Zuniga’s body. Actually, he arrived the night before.”
“So it is likely he shot my son.” Everyone waited as Gonda processed that information. “And tried to kidnap Bas’s son.” It was a statement, an acknowledgment.
“For ransom, you said,” Margot added.
“In my opinion, the ransom note was misdirection,” I said. “Marc would have taken the boy out on the desert and killed him. And by the time we finish gathering all the information, I believe we can prove it in a court of law.”
“I will accept your verdict.” Gonda rose, signaling the meeting was at an end.
As we broke up, he delayed me on the veranda of the chateau. “From your attitude, I can only gather you harbor further suspicions. You do not truly believe Margot was involved with my nephew in this madness, do you?”
“The questions had to be asked, Ariel. Unfortunately, it is you who will have to make a decision in that particular matter and then live with that decision.”
I held his pale blue stare and read vacillation. He went off subject. “I am mortified that one of my own nearly caused an accident that could well have taken your life. I assume Marc cut your brake line.”
“Yes. I believe that to be true. But you are not responsible for the actions of other people, Ariel. They are. Now you tell me something,” I added. “What are your intentions about the Dayton child? Will you pursue custody of the boy?”
A look of infinite sadness washed his features. “I intend to instruct Del Dahlman to make certain I have the rights of a legitimate grandfather. Nothing more.”
I limped back to Charlie’s car convinced Gonda had as many questions about his wife’s involvement in this mess as I did.
But at that moment, all I wanted was to have Charlie drop me by 5229 Post Oak Drive, where a handsome young man with a fascinating dragon tattoo on his left pec was waiting to ease my aches and pains… and perhaps a few other things, as well.
More from Don Travis
A BJ Vinson Mystery
B. J. Vinson is a former Marine and ex-Albuquerque PD detective turned confidential investigator. Against his better judgment, BJ agrees to find the gay gigolo who was responsible for his breakup with prominent Albuquerque lawyer Del Dahlman and recover some racy photographs from the handsome bastard. The assignment should be fast and simple.
But it quickly becomes clear the hustler isn’t the one making the anonymous demands, and things turn deadly with a high-profile murder at the burning of Zozobra on the first night of the Santa Fe Fiesta. BJ’s search takes him through virtually every stratum of Albuquerque and Santa Fe society, both straight and gay. Before it is over, BJ is uncertain whether Paul Barton, the young man quickly insinuating himself in BJ’s life, is friend or foe. But he knows he’s stepped into something much more serious than a modest blackmail scheme. With Paul and BJ next on the killer’s list, BJ must find a way to put a stop to the death threats once and for all.
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A BJ Vinson Mystery
Confidential investigator B. J. Vinson thinks it’s a bad joke when Del Dahlman asks him to look into the theft of a duck… a duck named Quacky Quack the Second and insured for $250,000. It ceases to be funny when the young thief dies in a suspicious truck wreck. The search leads BJ and his lover, Paul Barton, to the sprawling Lazy M Ranch in the Bootheel country of southwestern New Mexico bordering the Mexican state of Chihuahua.
A deadly game unfolds when BJ and Paul are trapped in a weird rock formation known as the City of Rocks, an eerie array of frozen magma that is somehow at the center of the entire scheme. But does the theft of Quacky involve a quarter-million-dollar duck-racing bet between the ranch’s owner and a Miami real estate developer, or someone attempting to force the sale of the Lazy M because of its proximity to an unfenced portion of the Mexican border? BJ and Paul go from the City of Rocks to the neon lights of Miami and back again in pursuit of the answer… death and danger tracking their every step.
Readers love the BJ Vinson Mysteries by Don Travis
The Zozobra Incident
“There are many likable secondary characters who play significant roles in the story. Combine that with the setting, beautifully detailed writing and a solid mystery makes this novel a must read for any mystery lover.”
—Gay Book Reviews
The Bisti Business
“All the essential elements that made the first story so engrossing are there, with a fresh new mystery and more interesting characters.”
—Michael Joseph Book Reviews
“BJ Vinson is one of my new favorite sleuths…”
—B. A. Brock Books
The City of Rocks
“Hands down, this is my favorite mystery series in a long time. Five stars!”
—The Novel Approach
DON TRAVIS is a man totally captivated by his adopted state of New Mexico. Each of his B. J. Vinson mystery novels features some region of the state as prominently as it does his protago
nist, a gay ex-Marine, ex-
cop turned confidential investigator. Don never made it to the Marines (three years in the Army was all he managed) and certainly didn’t join the Albuquerque Police Department. He thought he was a paint artist for a while, but ditched that for writing a few years back. A loner, he fulfills his social needs by attending SouthWest Writers meetings and teaching a weekly writing class at an Albuquerque community center.
Facebook: Don Travis
Twitter: @dontravis3
By Don Travis
BJ VINSON MYSTERIES
The Zozobra Incident
The Bisti Business
The City of Rocks
The Lovely Pines
Published by DSP PUBLICATIONS
www.dsppublications.com
Published by
DSP PUBLICATIONS
5032 Capital Circle SW, Suite 2, PMB# 279, Tallahassee, FL 32305-7886 USA
www.dsppublications.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of author imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Lovely Pines
© 2018 Don Travis.
Cover Art
© 2018 Maria Fanning.
Cover content is for illustrative purposes only and any person depicted on the cover is a model.
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