Murder, She Wrote: Prescription For Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “‘Close friend’? We were friends, acquaintances, and I suppose you could say business partners.”

  “What sort of business were you and Al in?” Seth asked.

  “He never told you? It is hard to explain. As you can see from my shop, what I once had is no longer. Now I make ends meet. But it wasn’t long ago that there was plenty of money from when I sold my factory building. The company that bought it turned it into a handsome social club. You can see it on Avenida Republica de Cuba. Once my father had a hundred tabaqueros and tabaqueras rolling cigars in our factory, and the best lectors reading the latest news, and short stories, too, by your Papa Hemingway and Agatha Christie and other great writers. We treated everyone well. Our cigars were among the best in the world. Now members of the club drink and eat and dance and hold their meetings in what was our building. It is a good place, the club, but I am sad every time I drive by.”

  It was obvious to Seth and me that Cespedes would get around to addressing Vasquez’s death only after he was finished lamenting what had happened to Ybor City and his family’s cigar factory. We listened patiently until Seth again asked, “What sort of business were you and Dr. Vasquez in?”

  Cespedes didn’t hesitate. “His research, of course,” he said.

  Seth and I looked at each other before Seth said, “The research? How were you and Dr. Vasquez involved together in his research?”

  “I invested in it, five hundred thousand dollars, what I received from the sale of my building.”

  Seth shook his head as though to clear it. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You invested in the research that Dr. Vasquez was doing to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease?”

  “Yes.”

  “But what about—?” I started to say.

  Seth finished the sentence for me. “Bernard Peters.”

  “Oh,” said Cespedes, “Mr. Peters is also an investor.”

  “Does he know about your investment in the research?” I asked.

  “No, no,” Cespedes said. “It was very important to Alvaro that my investment be kept a secret from everyone, anyone. I have never even told my wife.”

  “Do you know if there were other independent investors like you?” I asked.

  Cespedes shrugged. “Probably. Alvaro, he needed the money. He liked the high life, you know? The boats, the women, the good food. He liked to entertain his friends. Peters only gave him so much, and he expected it to go toward the laboratory.”

  “What were you to receive for the half million dollars you invested?” I asked.

  “Ten percent. I wasn’t sure whether to make the investment. Those savings were all I had. But to be on the ground floor, as you say, of a cure for that terrible disease, was a privilege I could not pass up. Alvaro told me that he was only allowing very few people to invest in his work.”

  “I assume you had a good written agreement with him,” Seth said.

  “Yes. Alvaro gave me a letter saying that when he found a cure, I would receive ten percent of all the money it would make. He told me never to show the letter to anyone.”

  “Just a letter?” I said, unable to keep incredulity from my voice. “And you trusted him that much?”

  “Yes, of course,” Cespedes replied. “He was my countryman—he was a man of great reputation, a man whose character was above reproach. He was—he was Cuban, my friend.”

  “This is what you wanted to talk to us about?” Seth said.

  “Yes. You are a medical doctor and Alvaro’s close friend. I asked Dr. Sardina about the research and whether Alvaro had found the cure.”

  “And what did he tell you?” I asked.

  “He said that it would be some time before the results could be evaluated. Yes, that is what he told me. I thought that maybe you could tell me more.”

  Seth grappled for an answer, finally saying, “I don’t have anything to tell you at the moment, but I might have information later. I’ll get in touch with you when I do.”

  “Gracias, gracias,” Cespedes said. “Alvaro told me that you are a fine and upstanding man and medical doctor.”

  “And I appreciate his kind words about me. We really should be going.”

  “Of course, of course. Before you do, may I ask you a question?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “There is the rumor in Ybor City, with some of my Cuban friends, that Alvaro might have been—how shall I say it?—that he might have been killed by an asesinato, not by the lightning.”

  “Asesinato?” Seth said. “Assassination?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Who would assassinate him?” I asked.

  Cespedes sighed deeply and shrugged. “The DI,” he said, “Castro’s intelligence agency. They have agents in Florida, many here in Tampa. They want to destroy our CAFA.”

  “Which is?” I asked.

  “Our Cuban American Freedom Alliance.”

  “Al told me about that,” Seth said to me. “It’s sort of the Cuban government in exile here in Florida, groups that want to topple Castro and return to Cuba.”

  “Do you have any proof?” I asked Cespedes.

  “Proof?” His laugh was cynical. “No, no proof, but there are the rumors, many rumors.”

  “Well,” Seth said, “there are always rumors. Like I said, Mr. Cespedes, I’ll let you know if I find out anything about Alvaro’s research. Thanks for letting us drop in. It was—interesting.”

  Seth was silent as we got in the car and headed back to the hotel.

  “What did you think?” I asked as he joined the flow of traffic.

  “Gorry, I don’t know what to think. I think I’d like to know who else invested in Al’s research. I’m beginnin’ to think that my good friend might not have been as much on the up-and-up as I thought.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Once settled in Seth’s hotel room, I plugged in my laptop and inserted the first of three thumb drives, and we settled back to read the words on the screen. One of the first files we opened simply contained a short list of names. Carlos Cespedes was among them.

  “Do you suppose these are the others who invested in Dr. Vasquez’s research without Bernie Peters’s knowledge?”

  “Mebbe.” Seth’s expression was worried. He wrote down the names on a lined legal pad.

  There were numerous separate documents, most of them containing a lot of long medical and scientific terms that I didn’t understand but knew that Seth did. We read in silence; Seth made an occasional note on his pad.

  After a half hour he said, “Stop it there, Jessica.”

  He rubbed his eyes and paced the room.

  “Have you learned anything so far?” I asked.

  “Not much, except that one of Al’s earlier experiments didn’t pan out the way he’d expected.”

  “It must be frustrating doing medical research,” I said. “I imagine there are lots of dead ends.”

  “That’s for sure. Hungry?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am.”

  “Let’s order up,” he said.

  I consulted the room service menu and read off items to Seth, who opted for onion soup and a Crab Louie salad. I was in a mood where making choices was difficult and simply ordered the same.

  “I can’t make sense out of this,” Seth said as he sat on a small couch and massaged his temples. “It doesn’t compute for me that Al would sell a stake in his research to someone like Cespedes. How could he do that? Bernie Peters is the one who bankrolled the research once Al came to the States. I’d understand it if Bernie approved having Cespedes provide additional funding, but to do it in secret?”

  I had been thinking a great deal about what Seth had said in the car, that maybe his friend wasn’t as honest and straightforward as he’d thought—as he’d hoped. I didn’t want to rub it in by reinforcing that possibility, but
Seth spared my having to mention it.

  “How could Al do such a thing? Sounds to me like he was selling Bernie out from under.” Seth brought his fist down hard on the couch’s armrest. “There’s got to be a reasonable answer to this, Jessica, because I will not accept that Al was conning people.”

  “Mr. Cespedes willingly and blindly entered into a business deal with Vasquez that wiped out what savings he’d accumulated from the sale of his building,” I said. “He wouldn’t be the first person to have been enticed to invest in something fraudulent.”

  “Well,” Seth said, “Al was . . .” His words trailed off.

  I knew what he was about to say.

  Alvaro Vasquez had defected from Cuba amid much fanfare. His reputation in Cuba was that of a pioneering medical researcher who was on the verge of conquering a particularly devastating disease. He’d settled in Tampa, Florida, and opened a laboratory in which he could continue his much ballyhooed work. It didn’t surprise me that Cespedes, and others like him, would have succumbed not only to Vasquez’s reputation, but to the Cuban physician’s personal charisma as well.

  One of many questions I had was whether Vasquez had approached Cespedes, or Cespedes had approached him seeking to invest in his research. And would it have made any difference? The great showman P. T. Barnum once said, “There’s a sucker born every minute and one to take him.” The movie The Producers also came to mind. Zero Mostel plays a shady theatrical producer who sells fifty percent shares in a play to multiple wealthy widows, convinced that the play would flop and none of the duped investors would have to be accounted to.

  Had Vasquez played that same con game, selling pieces of his research in the hope that . . . what? What could he have hoped for?

  I told Seth what had occurred to me.

  His silence said that his thinking was along the same lines.

  Our dinners arrived and we watched the news as we ate. It was toward the end of the newscast that a local anchor reported:

  Breaking news in the death of Dr. Alvaro Vasquez. A credible but anonymous source in Tampa law enforcement has told this station that the police are now treating the esteemed physician’s death as a possible homicide, based upon a report they received from the Tampa medical examiner. Dr. Vasquez, who was originally thought to have been struck by lightning, was a prominent medical researcher who’d defected from his native Cuba and settled in Tampa. The

  investigation is ongoing.

  “Detective Machado was certainly right about there being leaks from the ME’s office and his own department,” I commented after we’d turned off the television.

  “Seems that way,” said Seth. “Let’s get back to seeing what was on the laptop.”

  We spent hours more reading Vasquez’s entries, and I had to fight to maintain interest. The words became a blur at times, and I excused myself now and then to go splash cold water on my face. When the final entry had been read, and Seth had finished making notes, he sat back, rubbed his eyes, and said flatly and wearily, “He failed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Al failed, Jessica. According to what he’s written—and he’s written plenty, as you can see—every effort he made to find a breakthrough in definitively linking sugar and insulin resistance to Alzheimer’s was unsuccessful. He outlines several more research pathways to follow up on, but to date, he’s got nothing.”

  I didn’t know what I had expected to learn from reading Vasquez’s notes, but it certainly wasn’t what Seth had just announced.

  “You’re sure?” I asked. I was well aware that Seth was highly knowledgeable when it came to medicine, but maybe—just maybe—there were aspects of Vasquez’s research that were beyond his expertise.

  He nodded glumly. “Yes, I’m sure,” he said, “unless there were trials he ran that aren’t represented on these thumb drives. But I don’t think so. His last entry was the day before he died.”

  “He knew that his research had failed when he hosted the party at his house and wrote you that letter. But it sounded from what he wrote that he still felt that what he had achieved might be worthwhile in the hands of others.”

  “Ayuh, he did indicate that, Jessica. And it’s not unreasonable. Knowing what blind alleys a researcher has gone down can save other researchers a lot of pointless planning, not to mention time and money. But that’s not what’s on my mind at the moment.”

  “What is?”

  “Whoever killed him—and I’m assuming that the ME and the police are right in considering his death a homicide—did that person know that Al was engaged in these financial shenanigans, and even more important, did that person know that Al’s research didn’t pan out?”

  “You mean, if someone like Cespedes suspected the money he gave Al was squandered, and that he wasn’t going to share in the profits from the lab’s research, that would give him a strong motive for murder?”

  “It’s something to think about,” Seth said.

  “Well, Cespedes may have had an inkling something was wrong, but evidently he didn’t know for sure,” I said. “He was hoping to learn more information from you. We should look up the other people on that list we found in the file and find out if any of them will admit to giving Al money on the side.”

  “I have their names,” Seth said, drawing a circle around them on his legal pad. “But there’s another scenario to consider.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We may be the only ones who know that Al was unsuccessful. Maybe the person who killed him thought the key to a cure was in here.” He bounced one of the thumb drives up and down on his palm. “That person could have wanted Al out of the way, in order to benefit from the research.”

  “Bernie Peters?” I blurted out.

  “Maybe. All I know is that I’m not leaving Tampa until I find out the answer.”

  I looked at my friend of many years. He looked weary. His color was gray, and his voice had lost some energy. But I also saw in his eyes a steely determination.

  I didn’t know what was in store for me over the coming days in Tampa, but I was sure that it would be nothing like the idyllic life I usually led back in Cabot Cove. And I also knew that I’d be there for Seth no matter where his investigations led us.

  That’s what friends are for.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Sleep well?” I asked Seth the following morning when we met for breakfast.

  “You always did have a sense of humor, Jessica,” he said in a voice deepened by a lack of sleep.

  “I withdraw the question,” I said. “I didn’t sleep well either.”

  “No reason you should if I didn’t. Seen this?”

  He handed me that morning’s edition of the Tampa Tribune, opened to an inside page. I read the headline: “Intrigue on Davis Island: Dr. Alvaro Vasquez a Murder Victim? Police Think So.”

  The article took up the full page and was accompanied by a photograph of Vasquez.

  It was written by Peggy Lohman, the reporter who’d come to our table at the hotel a few days earlier.

  “No need to read it,” Seth said. “Nothing new in it, plenty of background on Al’s career and his defection from Cuba, lots of quotes from anonymous sources in the police department. She did interview Sardina.”

  “So he’s back,” I said. “What did he have to say?”

  “Not much. The reporter asked him how Al’s research was going, and Sardina said that it was going fine but that he wasn’t in a position to discuss it.”

  “Spoken like a politician,” I said. “Did he say anything else?”

  “Only that Al was a wonderful man and mentor and that he missed him and expressed his condolences to the family.”

  “Not exactly what he told us.”

  “We weren’t the press.”

  “I’m concerned about these leaks from the police. Have you heard more from Dr. Sa
n Martín?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have. Had a strange call from him first thing this morning. He wants to meet with us today.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “No, but he doesn’t want us to come to his office. We’re meeting him at some restaurant outside of downtown called the West Tampa Sandwich Shop. One o’clock. I have the directions.”

  “That is strange,” I said.

  “Everything about Al’s death is strange. I’m concerned about the set of thumb drives that I gave to Detective Machado. Seems like the police department is a sieve. Nothing’s secure. Maybe I shouldn’t have left them with him.”

  “You didn’t have any choice once he read about them in the letter.”

  Seth grunted his agreement.

  “So,” I said, “what’s on our schedule today?”

  “I called Al’s house. We’re going there at ten.”

  “Why so soon again?”

  “I want to talk with Ivelisse, see if she knows anything helpful.”

  “Whom did you speak with?”

  “Al’s son, Xavier. He just returned from Key West.”

  “How did he sound?”

  “Fine. I thought he might balk at having us come by. He actually sounded pleased. Hard to read him.”

  I glanced at my watch; eight o’clock.

  “Feel up to a walk after breakfast?” I asked. “I need a little exercise.”

  “’Fraid not, Jessica. Between my aching back and bad knee, I’d be lucky to make it a block, especially with the pace you like to set. Zach Shippee tells me I’m his annuity.” Shippee was Seth’s chiropractor in Cabot Cove.

  I couldn’t help laughing.

  “Nothing to laugh at, Jessica. You’ll get there one day, too.”

  “I wasn’t laughing at you, Seth. It’s just that what Zach said was—”

  “Might be funny to you, but not to me. Eat your breakfast and take your walk. We’ll meet up in the lobby at nine thirty.”

  I didn’t make any further mention of Seth’s aches and pains. He was clearly not in one of his better moods, and I’d learned years ago to back off when that was the case. We finished breakfast in relative silence. He headed for his room, and I winced as I saw him walk in obvious pain across the restaurant.