Hungry Ghosts

by Peggy Blair

  “Who murdered her—you?”

  “Not me, Ramirez. My killing days ended decades ago. I have a clear conscience.”

  “That usually reflects a bad memory.”

  The psychiatrist smiled. “You know at Castellanos they used to douse the dissidents with water, for better electrical conduction. Those are the people you’re dealing with. Give him back the list. You’re a good detective. You should be doing your job, not wading around in politics. It’s not healthy; you really are under a great deal of stress, you know. That’s my professional opinion. The minister is a dangerous man to have as an enemy. But at least you have something to trade. And he wants all the copies.”

  Doused them with water. Ramirez put the final pieces of the puzzle in place: the real reason that Manuel Flores was back in Cuba and who he was working with. “I don’t think so,” he said, and handed the report back to Flores.

  “Don’t be stupid, Ramirez. How long do you think you’ll survive in jail?”

  “You should ask yourself the same question.”

  “You’ll never prove I was involved in Antifona’s murder. All the evidence leads to you.”

  “Not Antifona’s death,” said Ramirez. “The premeditated murder of an Italian curator. That’s the real reason Antifona’s dead, isn’t it? She knew what the real Lorenzo Testa looked like. They were going to be engaged.”

  The paintings were as important to him as his own children. That’s what Dominique Gatti had said. But Lorenzo Testa wasn’t a father. According to Mama Loa, he wanted to get married so he could have children. He wasn’t an Iraqi tortured for information; he was a man who held the key to millions of dollars’ worth of art.

  “Detective Espinoza is at the airport now,” said Ramirez. “He called me just before I came here. It’s funny; Señor Testa seems to have changed his appearance quite dramatically in the course of a few days. Espinoza can’t find a flight into Havana with a passenger named Dominique Gatti, either, but I’m assuming she and the man who is pretending to be Señor Testa came here from Guantánamo Bay. Are they American CIA? Señora Gatti, or whoever she really is, wore the uniform well, I must say. In the panic over a bomb, people saw what they expected to see. They thought she was a man. So did I. It sounds like, occasionally, so does she.”

  Flores kept his face composed, but he shifted slightly in his seat. Nassara was right, thought Ramirez. Follow the money.

  “You planned this with the CIA for months,” said Ramirez. “A conspiracy to steal priceless Italian masterpieces. The CIA is always happy to embarrass Cuba, and if it can find a way to get money that’s off the books to fund its secret operations, I’m sure it doesn’t shy away. And you need money too, lots of it, if you’re going to get that new treatment for your cancer. That’s what we always hear about America, how expensive their health care is.”

  “You credit me with a great deal of complexity, Ramirez,” said Flores, but Ramirez read fear in the older man’s face.

  “You certainly had me thinking along certain lines, Dr. Flores. Graffiti, political protests, damaged artworks, I could have run around in circles for days. But it’s the only way to steal art from a place like Cuba, isn’t it? Deface paintings that have been brought into the country legitimately and then demand their removal for repairs so you can take them wherever you like. But to do that, you had to kidnap the real Lorenzo Testa and make sure he gave you the information you needed.

  “When he told you about his girlfriend, Antifona Conejo, you sent Dominique Gatti to find out if she was going to be a problem. Then you had the brilliant idea of killing Antifona and framing me so I’d be out of the picture, no pun intended. It almost worked. But I can assure you, those paintings will never make it to Guantánamo Bay, I’m guessing that’s where they were really headed. And neither will the imposters.”

  “You breached a direct order from the minister. He’ll have your job.”

  “Do you think so?” said Ramirez. He reached in his pocket and put the listening device on the coffee table. “This is one of the bugs I found. Which means that Cuban Intelligence has been listening to our conversation. I don’t think either of the Castros will be happy to find out that the entire time you were supposed to be working on Luis Posada’s trial, you were actually plotting an art heist with the American CIA.”

  Ramirez picked up the listening device and threw it on the ground. He stood up and crushed it with his shoe. “Now that’s gone, perhaps we can speak a little more freely.”

  The old man blanched. “What do you want, Ramirez?”

  “I’m tired of the minister’s brinkmanship. You’re going to call him and tell him the mission was successful. Tell him that I gave you the CD from Sanchez’s laptop with the distribution list on it, but regrettably there was an accident. You wanted to make sure I was telling the truth. You accidentally erased it, like Nixon’s secretary.”

  He dialed the minister’s number and handed Flores his cell phone. Flores made the call and hung up.

  “What will happen now?” the older man asked. His face was ashen.

  “That’s up to Cuban Intelligence. As far as I’m concerned, you already have a death sentence. No money means no more treatments, and they’ll never let you leave Cuba again. How long do you have left? A few weeks? A few months? That’s if they don’t put you in a psychiatric institution to rot. I think you’ve been suffering from delusions of capitalism. Imagine what it would be like to spend your last days at Mazorra or Castellanos. You might even run into some of your old patients. But don’t worry, most of them are sane.”

  Ramirez turned to go. But before he left Flores’s apartment to walk back downstairs, he picked up the profiler’s report. When he got to his car, he held it with the very tips of his fingers as he put a match to it, making sure he wouldn’t get burned.

  59

  Charlie Pike sat in the front seat of Sheldon Waubasking’s truck. “That’s why you beat up Billy so bad in remand, isn’t it?” said Pike. “You found out about Molly.”

  Sheldon nodded, ashamed. “He called her a slut because she got pregnant. He had no right to do that. I should have told someone back then what Chesley did to her.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up now. We were just kids.”

  That’s how it started, thought Pike. Stories of incest that hid in the woods, in the bedrooms, behind walls.

  “That Maylene Kesler, bringing all that stuff up. Did that guy Adam Neville really kill her?”

  Pike shook his head. He turned to face his friend. “No. But you know who did, don’t you, Sheldon. You recognized those tire marks. That’s why you showed them to me. You wanted me to think they were all-seasons instead of just real old and worn. Same as those shoe prints. They weren’t from a woman walking up to the truck door and back to the highway. They were from a woman getting out of her truck and walking back to it later.”

  Sheldon fell silent. He knew all right, thought Pike, but Sheldon wouldn’t tell. He’d go to jail before he’d say who in his community was guilty of murder.

  But Pike had it figured out. Celia Jones had said it herself. It didn’t matter whether they were white, red, or green: when it came to getting into someone’s car, women were afraid of men. But not of other women.

  “I said another little prayer for her today,” the killer had said. Another prayer for Maylene Kesler. It had taken Pike a while before he realized that meant there was a first one.

  Freda Wabigoon answered the door. Her shoulders sagged when she saw him.

  “I know why you’re here, Charlie. Sit down in the kitchen; I’ll make us some tea. I’m alone today. All the boys are at school. You’re not in a hurry, are you?”

  “You know I have to caution you before you say anything else, Freda. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to a lawyer. If you can’t afford one, o
ne will be provided to you.”

  “I don’t need a lawyer. I know what I did. And I know what Chesley did too.” Freda sighed. “That woman, that lady doctor, she had Chesley’s blood tests from way back in the 1970s. That’s when they first tested him for mercury. And she had Pauley’s too. After Molly ran away, she called me because I was Pauley’s legal guardian.”

  Freda started to weep.

  “Tell me how you did it,” said Pike. He sat down beside her. He saw a box of Kleenex on the coffee table and handed her one.

  “I said I’d meet her at the clinic,” she said, blowing her nose. “She explained it all to me there. She wanted me to know she was going to report what she found. She said she had to; it’s the law. She wouldn’t listen when I told her Billy would be ruined if that story got out about his dad and his sister, that he’d never be elected chief again, would never be regional chief. And there are so many media up this way now. You know what it’s like here, Charlie. People talk. She had no heart at all, that woman. It was like she was made out of ice.”

  “Incest is a crime,” said Pike. “It’s in the Criminal Code. She probably thought she didn’t have a choice.”

  “What about our laws, Charlie? You always have a choice. Nothing good was going to come out of her reporting that to the police; it was only going to hurt a lot of innocent people. But she was stubborn. I tried so hard, but I couldn’t make her listen. She was just the same as all those nuns at residential school who treated us like we didn’t matter. So I told her she’d better come home with me, so she could tell Pauley herself. She said she had a rental and it didn’t have very good winter tires. I said we could take my truck instead. The weather was still bad. It had just stopped snowing. I pulled over to the side of the road as soon as we got on the reserve, away from the highway. I told her I was having problems with the engine. I put up the hood, put some red pylons out. But I forgot them when I drove away, I was so upset.”

  The red pylons, Pike thought. He never thought to ask Sheldon where he got them.

  “I pulled my axe out of the back and I told her to walk in front of me into the woods. I grabbed her from behind when we got inside. I’m still strong, Charlie. Despite the diabetes.”

  Years of pulling nets in the bay.

  “I said a little prayer for her after. I burned some tobacco. Then I chopped out a grave, and I put the brush on top of her, to protect her from the animals.”

  We always bury our dead.

  “Where did the axe come from?”

  “It’s the one I use for ice fishing. It’s in the back of the truck now, where it always is. What are you going to do to me, Charlie?”

  “I have to take you in, Freda. That’s first-degree murder.”

  “What’s the sentence for that? Will they hang me?”

  Pike shook his head. “They don’t hang people anymore. Life imprisonment is twenty-five years. Maybe they’ll agree to second degree if you admit what you did. The judge will decide how long before you get parole. Could be ten, twenty years.”

  “Twenty years?” She nodded, wiped a tear from her eye. “That’s a long time. I’ll be old when I get out. Okay. Let me go say goodbye to Pauley. You tell Bill what happened, okay? Tell him not to worry.”

  “He knows lots of good lawyers, Freda.”

  She smiled sadly. “A few too many, if you ask me.”

  She stood up and walked down the hallway before Charlie Pike remembered that Pauley Oshig was at school.

  He jumped to his feet and began to run after her. He heard the shotgun blast before he made it down the hall.

  60

  Inspector Ramirez met up with Detective Espinoza at the airport. The young detective was grinning. “You were right, Inspector. They hadn’t booked a flight at all. Patrol found them loading the paintings into a van, and arrested them. The driver says they offered him a thousand U.S. dollars to take them to Guantánamo. The museum had no way of knowing they weren’t headed for the airport. Or that Señor Testa was an imposter. He’s been wearing Testa’s clothes all week. No one at the museum had ever seen the real Señor Testa in person. They dealt with him only by email, and occasionally by phone.”

  “Good work, Fernando. Do we have any idea who Dominique Gatti is?”

  “None. As I told you on the phone, she didn’t fly into Havana—she’s not on the airport surveillance tapes. Do you really think she came from Guantánamo Bay? It’s not easy to get through the checkpoints. Maybe she’s an American.”

  Ramirez thought for a moment, remembering his dream. He shook his head. “Wait here for a minute,” he said to Espinoza, and walked over to one of the airport clerks.

  “Hola,” he said, showing her his badge. “Is there anyone here who speaks Italian?”

  “Sonia does,” the woman said. “She’s on her break. I’ll go get her.”

  A few minutes later, the other clerk materialized beside the first one. “How can I help you?” she asked.

  “The name Dominique Gatti. Do those words mean anything special in Italian?”

  “Not really,” she said, wrinkling her forehead. “Dominique is just a name. Gatti is a common name too, but it can mean someone who is very agile, like a cat.”

  Ramirez nodded. “Gracias, Señora.” He walked back to Espinoza, thinking.

  Manuel Flores had said the organized killer enjoyed leaving clues out in the open. Maybe “Gatti” was Dr. Flores’s little joke. Ramirez recalled Hector Apiro telling him about the Cuban doctors sent to foreign countries and the children kept behind to make sure they’d return. Castro would never let a valuable resource like Manuel Flores go to the United States for medical treatment without ensuring he’d be available whenever Castro needed him. And despite being in the middle of treatment for a deadly cancer in New York, Flores had come back.

  “I think she could be Manuel Flores’s daughter.”

  “That makes sense, Inspector,” said Espinoza. “He told me she was living near the base at Guantánamo, and that she was a language teacher and a gymnast. That would explain how she was able to get in and out of the building so quickly.”

  “People see what they expect to see. The tourists saw a policeman that day because the person they saw wore a policeman’s uniform. We assumed she was Italian, because she spoke the language and because that’s what she told us.” Ramirez shook his head at how easily they’d been misled; how effectively Manuel Flores had predisposed them to believe what he wanted them to think was true.

  “When you interrogate her, lie to her. Tell her that Manuel Flores is dead; it may unnerve her and help you with questioning. By the way, Natasha found an incident report filed by a foot patrolman. He saw Antifona Conejo standing outside the Hotel Nacional on February 14 with a foreign woman. Ask Natasha if she can get hold of the patrolman to see if the woman she was with is Señora Gatti. If he identifies her, you can use that to question her as well. If he doesn’t, pretend he did.”

  “You don’t want to interrogate these two yourself?”

  “No need,” said Ramirez.

  If they were CIA operatives, Ramirez doubted they’d say anything incriminating. But they didn’t have to. The two prisoners could be useful pawns in the diplomatic war of words being waged in Geneva. The man impersonating Lorenzo Testa might be of interest to the prosecutors in the torture trial about to start in Rome. If so, the Italians might be persuaded to keep the matter of the vandalism at the museum quiet.

  Ramirez was sure the Cuban emissaries would find a way to work things out. Negotiations, he’d learned, involved the art of diplomacy. It worked well enough, as long as you had something of value to exchange. This time they did.

  “It will be good experience for you, Fernando.” Ramirez clapped his hand on Espinoza’s back. “I’m sure you’ll do well.”

  Ramirez had started to walk away when Espinoza called him back. “Oh, Inspector, I almost
forgot. Dominique Gatti was wearing this gold chain. I think it belonged to Señor Testa. Once a thief, always a thief, yes?”

  Espinoza handed Ramirez a plastic exhibit bag. It held a thick gold braid.

  Mama Loa was waiting for Ramirez next to his car in the parking lot. She sat on a small patch of grass beside the iron fence, her swollen legs folded beneath her.

  “She’s dead now, isn’t she,” she said. “I see her, Antifona, in my dreams last night. She’s running in the woods, scared. She calls out my name; she wants me to help. She say she made a bad mistake; her lwa is angry. Nothing I can do in a dream. That pretty girl.” She shook her head. “Some houngans, they claim they can bring back the dead. Me, I think it’s better to leave them alone.”

  “Yes,” Ramirez said. “She’s dead. I’m sorry. I somehow dragged her into this.”

  Antifona’s ghost had come from the future to help him with his investigation into her sister’s and boyfriend’s deaths. Perhaps she hoped to change her fate as well. But the future was already written, as his grandmother often said. Sometimes, thought Ramirez, it was easier to rewrite the past.

  “The gods must have wanted her. You can’t blame yourself. But now both my goddaughters are gone. Sit beside me for a minute,” Mama Loa said, moving aside to make room for him on the concrete curb. The tears welled in her eyes; she wiped them away. “Tell me why.”

  Ramirez told the old black woman about the failed art heist and the reason Antifona’s foreign boyfriend hadn’t contacted her. But he had no explanation for LaNeva Otero’s death. It was pure, random evil.

  He reached into his jacket pocket and removed the plastic exhibit bag. He opened it and handed Mama Loa the gold chain. “Here, I think you should have this. Maybe you can sell it and use the money to find a place to live. A place where your goddaughters can escape the men who hurt them.”