The Body in the Bed (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 5)

by Jerold Last

  "Yes, if I can keep the files afterwards, especially if I find what I'm looking for when we examine them. Don't worry, I can guarantee they won't fall into the wrong hands, at least from your perspective."

  We talked about the party last night, about our respective families, and about how long we'd be staying in Montevideo for a few minutes longer before I took my leave. The bus stop for my return trip to the hotel was right across the street from the Intendencia office building, so I was back at the hotel before Suzanne. There was a message in our mailbox from Eduardo suggesting some Uruguayan fast food and a beer for lunch if we returned before one o'clock. By the time I connected with Eduardo, Suzanne was just walking into the front door of the hotel. We walked together a block or two up the broad avenue to a suitable place to get chevitos and cerveza, and sat at a convenient table.

  I sipped some beer and asked the others, "I connected with Martin and he's promised to get me the personnel files as soon as he can. Has anybody else made any progress yet?"

  Eduardo finished chewing his mouthful of sandwich, and pulled a thick envelope out of his pocket. He made a big production out of opening the envelope and removing the top sheet from a thick stack of folded computer paper. "The printout of the names of Iranian agents currently active in South America downloaded from the computer just as I was walking out of the facility. Most of this stuff is details: other assignments, areas of specialization, most recent photograph. The top sheet is an overall summary. We have about a dozen possibilities to sort through. Does anybody have any ideas how to begin?"

  Suzanne made a major production of lifting her hand in a universal gesture meaning "wait a moment", elaborately mimicked Eduardo chewing his sandwich, and finally looked at him and asked, "Is there a female agent on the list whose first name begins with an 'L'?"

  Eduardo quickly scanned the list, did a double take worthy of the best comedians in the movies, and looked a lot more carefully at the list. Then he riffled through the rest of the papers, looked closely at several sheets, and turned back to Suzanne.

  "That's either one of your all-time best intuitive leaps or a hell of a trick. How did you do that?"

  "You first, then I'll explain," answered Suzanne.

  "We're looking at Leila Tehrani as our prime suspect on the Iranian side. I'll pass her dossier around in a minute. She's an experienced spy, specializes in seduction, blackmail and assassination. She's one of their best, extremely dangerous, and quite beautiful. I've crossed her path before and that little stunt with Bernardo fits her modus operandi like a glove. OK, Suzanne, how did you guess who it was?"

  She reached over and patted Eduardo's hand. "You can thank Patricia Colletti for that one. She peeked at Bernardo's little black book calendar of appointments recently and came up with a new girlfriend, first initial 'L', name that sounded like Lila, which would be the nearest South American equivalent of Leila. Patricia also pointed out that any woman who could easily seduce Bernardo would probably be beautiful and would ideally be Aryan, which Persians are. I think everything fits nicely that Ms. Tehrani is choreographing this ballet. Now we need to know who is in the supporting cast, why the ballet is being performed right now with us in the cast, and what we should do about it, given that we seem to have been nominated to be the critics as well as performing a small featured part in the ballet ourselves."

  Eduardo passed the three sheets dedicated to the life and career of Leila Tehrani around. Her photo showed a beautiful, dark-haired woman who looked to be about our age, in her mid-thirties. The rest was the details that Eduardo had summarized very accurately and succinctly. She was credited with half a dozen murders, suspected of upwards of a dozen more. Her seduction score sheet credited her with even larger numbers. We were not going up against an amateur here.

  Eduardo collected the pages, collated them, folded them precisely, and put them back into his pocket. "I still have to get the paperwork downloaded about the embassy staff and the bank records for them and the police captains. Let's get together for dinner as planned. Maybe we'll know some more by then. Great work Suzanne. At least we know the mastermind we're up against now." He left the table while we finished our beers and settled the bill.

  We had an afternoon off to go play. Our first stop was a store on the broad Avenue of July 18th to buy a couple of cheap cell phones with a few hundred pre-paid minutes so we could stay in contact for the next few days. I called Martin and Eduardo to leave messages with our new contact information.

  "OK, Suzanne, here we are. No baby, no friends, no work, and no particular place we have to be for the next few hours. What are you most in the mood to do?"

  "I hate to tempt fate, but what do you think the odds are of something bad happening again if we go for a run on the Rambla? They must be infinitesimally low. I think one dismembered body lying in the park like we found our first time here is our full quota for a lifetime."

  "That run sounds good to me, especially if we can share a shower afterwards. Is it a deal?"

  A half an hour later we had changed into running clothes and were well into our first mile. It was perfect weather for running: a cool day with a light breeze blowing in from the Rio de la Plata. We matched our paces, a trick we had learned a long time ago, so we could run side by side and easily talk about the people and dogs we were seeing in the park and about the case while we ran. I had a new idea, coupled to something a little bit off that we had heard at Martin's party, that I wanted to bounce off of Suzanne.

  "I'm still a little bit bothered by Captain Flores' clumsy attempt to get you to identify who Eduardo is, and what his role was in what he called our adventures here in Montevideo. It makes me suspicious of him and his reasons for trying to identify Eduardo. What do you think would happen if someone who sounded like Jose, the room clerk at the hotel, called him to ask for more money?"

  "I think we'd have a difficult time getting Jose to co-operate on that one. He'd be risking his life and he would know it."

  "I have an idea how to handle that part."

  "Then it's worth a try. I assume the goal is to stir things up and to encourage our hypothetical crooked captain to reveal himself in a compromising situation. But I'd make the phony phone call to all three of them, not just to Eloy Flores. I didn't trust any of them any further than Robert could throw them. I think I'd also discuss this whole idea with Eduardo before I tried it; he might have some plans of his own and we wouldn't want to end up at cross-purposes with either him or Martin."

  We finished our 6-mile run in just under an hour. On our way back to the hotel I bought a small digital recorder that easily fit in my pocket without any obvious bulges. We stopped at the front desk on our way up to the room. As luck would have it, Jose was one of the two clerks on duty. I approached him and said hello and asked if there were any messages for us in Spanish. He replied in Spanish, telling me there weren't any messages and asking whether we were happy with our new room accommodations. I replied positively and we chatted for a few minutes longer about what we had done and seen in Montevideo, the weather, and other such trivia. He seemed immensely relieved that we seemed not to be upset with him.

  When we were finally up in the room Suzanne firmly closed the door, walked up to me, and planted a long and lingering kiss on my mouth. "How about that shower now? Or do we have to listen to the recording you made of Jose first?"

  "My priorities are in the right order. Let's shower first and listen to the recording last. In between is up for grabs."

  We showered and listened to the recording with an appropriate amount of grabbing in between.

  Chapter7 . Searching for a crooked cop

  Martin's call came less that a minute after we had turned off the recording, which was a surprisingly high quality reproduction of a surprisingly low quality conversation. He wasted no time on pleasantries, but told me where, a nearby bar, and when, 15 minutes from now, we should meet.

  Suzanne and I were sitting at a table with a couple of beers when Martin walked in, looked
around, and spotted us. His familiar trench coat was quickly placed over the back of the chair and he sat at the table. He handed a large brown envelope to me with a request that I place it below table level in my lap and wait to look at the contents until we were somewhere other than a public place. He ordered a cup of coffee and asked whether our investigation had made any progress that we could tell him about.

  "I think we have a lead to a possible person of interest who might have killed Bernardo, but it's all completely speculative at this point. We definitely don't have the kind of hard evidence yet that you're going to need to start thinking about arresting somebody. But we've made some progress and have a theory, which we're almost ready to share with you. Hopefully the files you just brought us will give us a new direction to look and we might actually be able to get some evidence of the kind you need for an arrest."

  Martin picked up his coffee cup, took a few sips, and carefully set it down on its saucer. "I guess I should count my blessings that you're talking about arrests and not summary execution of the criminals this time around. Please let me know if you find out there's a rotten apple in the police force, even if you can't prove it beyond a reasonable doubt."

  We stood up to shake hands and he left. Suzanne and I finished our beers a few minutes later to walk back to the hotel and look at the files in the privacy of our room. As we walked the five blocks along the broad avenue that cut through the crowded streets of Montevideo I spotted two of my favorite idioms that we never learned in Spanish classes at home. A one-way street apparently has only one hand: the sign says "una mano". To add insult to injury with that particular idiom, so much for the basic rule in Spanish that any word that ends with an "o" is masculine gender. And an all you can eat buffet lunch is apparently eaten with a "free fork" since the sign says "tenedor libre".

  Back in the room we looked at the personnel files for the three captains. Obviously, everything was in Spanish, so we had to read everything. Skimming wasn't going to be enough here. We shared the files. Since Suzanne read a lot faster than I could in Spanish she got Andres Fortunato and Juan Blanco, while I chose my favorite, Eloy Flores, for careful perusal. Police personnel files are similar everywhere on the first page: name, rank, serial number, and that kind of stuff. After that first page there's a lot of narrative, all of which we had to read carefully. Both of us had a large pad of paper and a few pens to take notes with as we went along. Suzanne got the desk and I sprawled out on top of the bed. An hour later, we were both finished and ready to compare notes. Suzanne joined me on the bed and lay beside me as I took the first turn.

  "There were two reasons for me to have Eloy Flores as my favorite suspect to be the mole in the police force before I read anything, his awkward question at the party about Eduardo and the title of Chief for Intelligence, which I assumed meant that he was the captain most likely to come into contact with the Iranian embassy staff or other Iranian nationals in the line of duty. I just learned the importance of reading the fine print in this kind of cross-cultural personnel file. The Chief for Intelligence in the Montevideo police force is charged with the official responsibility for anti-terrorist and anti-subversive activities, but that means only the domestic subversives and terrorists, not foreign agents.

  Suzanne casually increased the amount of body contact and checked her notes.

  "Andres Fortunato's file was boring. There's nothing in there that makes me suspicious of him. He was a street cop for almost 20 years, working his way up to Lieutenant. He hasn't ever done anything special, good or bad. Obviously, someone in power likes him since he's been promoted regularly. For the last few years he's been a paper pusher. He decides who gets assigned where, but someone else decides what to do with the individual when they get there. If I needed one word to summarize him, I'd go with bland. He seems to be completely under the radar.

  "Juan Blanco is anything but bland. It turns out that the captain whose job description includes schmoozing with diplomats and embassy staff at parties and official functions is the Chief for Administration, Juan Blanco. So he had the opportunity to meet some Iranians on the job. And your guess that he's former military was right on target. He did 20 years in the army before joining the police force. His army record in this file is sketchy, but he's the right age to have been a junior officer during the military dictatorship so we can assume his politics are pretty far right of center. That's about all I could find on the first pass, but Blanco probably fits the role of our possible villain about as well as Flores. I might be tempted to give Fortunato a pass unless Eduardo turns up any dirt on him."

  "Can I have a look at Blanco's file, Suzanne? And why don't you look Flores' file over to make sure I didn't miss anything."

  We exchanged files and started reading. It went faster than the first time through because we had a pretty good idea of what we might be looking for and where in the file it would be. Half an hour later, we were ready to compare notes.

  "I don't think you missed anything important in Eloy Flores' file, Roger. For the moment let's just assume that either he asked the wrong question at the wrong time, or else he's a very devious bastard who hasn't left a paper trail in the files. However, it might be worth noting that whoever set up Bernardo Colletti's murder was also a very devious bastard. How about you, Roger? Did you find anything else in Juan Blanco's file?"

  "Anything tangible, no. Did I have any feelings or get any impressions? I don't know.

  "I had one real off the wall thought while I was reading the file though. It occurred to me that if Martin wasn't just a couple of minutes away from the hotel because he met us at the airport when I called him to report the murder, the case would have initially been assigned to someone wearing a uniform by Captain Fortunato. We would have been the prime suspects and probably in some real trouble, especially if all three of the captains were involved in some sort of elaborate conspiracy to use us to bring Martin down. When Eduardo gets all of the banking paperwork for us to look at we should try to match up the dates on any large unaccountable deposits to any of the captains with the records of the other two. I'm still not convinced that they weren't working in collusion to frame us for the murder."

  Just then my new cell phone rang. Eduardo had another set of files for us to read. He would pick us up at the hotel within an hour and had a surprise for us for a working dinner.

  Chapter8 . International connections and baiting a trap

  Part of his surprise was that he had borrowed a car from a colleague. The other part was that he had arranged for dinner and wine tasting in the special events banquet room at our favorite winery. We would have a bunch of wines to taste and a gourmet dinner while we were reading files. Nice work if you can get it. Apparently Eduardo had a friend who could, even though we weren't wealthy wine buyers to be courted. We had a gourmet dinner, the best wines to drink in Uruguay, and the use of a banquet hall for our "business meeting" as a freebie. I never did find out what the friend did to deserve this kind of treatment by the winery owners. Maybe I didn't really want to know anyway.

  Dinner, which lasted almost 2.5 hours, was six separate courses served in the haute French style from appetizer to soup to fish to meat to salad to dessert. Unlimited amounts of their best reserve wines to match each course were poured. Service was perfect. My favorite Tannat varietal wine was paired with the beef dish and again with the sweet dessert. We did a bit of work too. By the end of the meal, over dessert flan and coffee, we discussed what we had learned from the files. The embassy staff lived well, but not extravagantly. There were several exceptions, embassy staff members who had much larger amounts of money flowing through their bank accounts. These included the military attache, several of the ambassador's staff including the cultural attache, and three members of the security staff from the embassy. Leila Tehrani's name did not appear on the list.

  "Can we assume all of these richer staff members from the embassy are spies of one sort or another, and that's where all of this money is going?" asked Suzanne.
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br />   "I would," replied Eduardo.

  The corresponding files for the police captains were unremarkable. There were no simultaneous large deposits for any pair or all three of the captains. Of the three Eloy Flores was by far the wealthiest, which explained how he had attracted a trophy wife, but the money had been in the account for several years so wasn't a recent gift from the Iranians. All three had high savings account balances, which would be impossible to accumulate on their salaries. All three had probably either married wealthy women or taken some bribes or other form of graft at some time in their careers. No surprise there. It was probably the pattern for most policemen who stayed with the career anywhere in a developing country.

  Eduardo took back his files with a sigh. "Nothing that points to any of the three captains there. Maybe Suzanne's famous intuition got the wrong signal this time around. Did you get the personnel files from Martin?"

  "Yes, we did. We spent all afternoon studying them. We didn't find anything in the files. But I had another idea. Do you have a colleague who can do convincing voice imitations on the phone?"