The Black Widow - Mark Kane Mysteries - Book Three: A Private Investigator Crime Series of Murder, Mystery, Suspense & Thriller Stories...with a dash of Romance

by John Hemmings

  “I expect the police in Olongapo would welcome any help they can get if it saves them expending their own time and effort.” Santos chuckled in the manner of a schoolboy who’d just been shown a lewd picture. “Just give me few minutes.”

  I arrived back at the hotel just before eight o’clock. Lucy was nowhere to be seen. It was warm and humid. I went up to the rooftop where there was a swimming pool, but the pool was closed for renovation. It looked as if it had been closed for renovation for some time, perhaps forever. I went back to the room and waited for Lucy, turning over in my mind what I’d learned from Santos.

  I’d made some notes while Santos was going through the reports. One of the things I’d written down with a big question mark was the report made by Mrs. Sands about the disappearance of her husband. The report had stated: ‘His boat was missing too’. Why would Cary have told the police that Larry’s boat was missing if she knew that he’d transferred ownership of the boat to Porter? And yet Dale had seemed certain that Cary would confirm that this was so. Perhaps it wasn’t so. Perhaps it was a bluff on Dale’s part. If Cary claimed to know nothing about the transfer of the boat when I had the chance to talk to her Dale could simply explain it away by saying that perhaps Larry hadn’t told his wife about it. Lucy was already convinced of Dale’s innocence, but I preferred to keep an open mind.

  Lucy bounced in soon after eight and announced that she was starving. There was a large seafood restaurant I’d passed about five blocks from the hotel. It was called Josephine’s and I vaguely remembered seeing some reference to it in Lucy’s Lonely Planet guidebook which I’d been leafing through earlier in the day. I suggested we try it; it would satisfy Lucy’s craving for local food and we were bound to find at least something palatable. It was a pleasantly cool evening. I was surprised; I’d always thought of Manila as the tropics and hadn’t appreciated that it would be this cool in winter.

  Josephine’s turned out to be a good choice. It was one of those rare occasions that a meal could accurately be described as sumptuous. After dinner we strolled back to the hotel and discussed our travel details for the following day.

  “I’ve looked it up,” said my new temporary assistant. Lucy had her tablet connected to the Wi-fi in the hotel room and had been researching our travel itinerary for tomorrow.

  “If we go all the way by road it’ll take us about five hours. We have to drive to Angeles City in a province called Pampanga, which takes about an hour or two, depending on the traffic, and then take the highway to Subic which takes about another hour. But the problem is that it can take up to two hours just to get to the outskirts of Metro Manila if the traffic’s bad – and the traffic always seems to be bad. So it’s better if we fly to Clark airport, which is near Angeles City, and then take a one hour drive to Subic from there.”

  “Okay, let’s do that then.”

  “Can we leave in the afternoon tomorrow?” Lucy said. “There are still some things I want to see here, and we have the hotel until twelve. Then we can fly to Clark and maybe stay there overnight and go on to Subic the next day. That way we get to see more places and it’ll be less tiring.” She looked at me plaintively. I folded. At least that’s what she thought. As it happened I was going to need another morning in Manila anyway; there was something I wanted to clear up.

  “I guess a day won’t make any difference,” I said.

  Back at the hotel Lucy went online to book our tickets for the forty-minute domestic flight to Clark. “We can hire a car or take a car with a driver from Angeles to Subic. What do you think?”

  “Car with driver I think, if we can get one that speaks English. We’ve got a few different places to go and we won’t have the hassle of finding our way or looking for parking. Anyway, I don’t feel like driving. I’m on vacation.”

  “I thought this was work.”

  “It’s a working vacation,” I said. “Santos went over the police reports with me this afternoon.”

  “Were they helpful?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “When Mrs. Sands reported her husband missing she told the police that the boat was missing too. That rather suggests that she didn’t know anything about Dale’s claim that Larry had transferred the boat to him, doesn’t it?”

  “Maybe the police made a mistake. Perhaps it was somebody else who said the boat was missing. You think there’s more to it because you have a suspicious mind.”

  “If you want to maintain your position of assistant to a latter-day Sherlock Holmes you’ll need to be able to tell the difference between a suspicious mind and an inquiring one. You’re allowing yourself to be influenced by your preconceived impression of Dale as an all-round nice guy. I’m not so sure.”

  “Well, Cary’s the one who needs to clarify that isn’t she? It doesn’t seem likely that Dale would have asked us to check with her if it wasn’t true.”

  “I’m going to try and see Dale again tomorrow, before we fly to Clark. I want to tie him down to a date when he says this transaction took place.”

  “It’s just as well we’re not leaving until the afternoon then,” Lucy said.

  Chapter Seven

  Clark

  I arrived early at the Police Headquarters. I showed the letter that Santos had provided for me and was told that it would take about two hours to arrange Dale’s transfer. I went out and found a coffee shop and twiddled my thumbs for an hour or two. It was my own fault; I should have covered this the day before. At eleven o’clock I went back to the police station. Half an hour later I was told that I could see Mr. Porter and I was led to the same room that we’d occupied the previous day.

  “Hi Dale, how’s it going?”

  “Hi Mr. Kane, I wasn’t expecting to see you again so soon; any news?”

  “No, not yet; Lucy and I are traveling to Clark this afternoon and then driving to Subic tomorrow. We’re hoping to link up with Cary, but we haven’t contacted her yet. I’m here because there’s something I forgot to ask you yesterday and Cary may not remember. Can you tell me when you reached the deal about the boat with Larry; or more particularly when you got the boat? As you know the boat is the reason you’re here so I need all the information I can get.”

  Dale wrinkled his brow in an apparent attempt to concentrate. After a while he said: “I’m sorry I really can’t remember.” Then he thought for a while longer before saying, “Sometime in September it must have been.”

  “Early, middle, late?”

  “I can’t remember, I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Okay, well it was worth a try. Hopefully we’ll be back in Manila in a few days. Lucy says to say Hi.”

  As I waited for a taxi back to the hotel I wondered whether his lack of detail was deliberate or whether he really had a lapse of memory. It wasn’t that long ago and he must remember when he first learned of Larry’s disappearance; that should jog his memory. I’d try to meet up with Hendriks and also try to find out when Dale leased his mooring for the boat. I hadn’t raised the matter of bail with Santos. For the time being I was happy that he was in police custody. It would allow me to investigate the matter without interference. In any event, there was no apparent source of funds for bail.

  Lucy was off visiting Intramuros, a kind of fort which dated back to the days of the Spanish occupation which had preceded the American occupation. It was one of the few historical sites of any real interest in Manila. Lucy had discovered that virtually the only country in Asia that had never been occupied or colonized by foreigners was Thailand. She thought that was probably what made it seem so different she told me. She was late getting back to the hotel and I needed to check out so I packed for both of us and waited for her in the lobby. “Let’s go,” I said, as soon as she arrived.

  Our driver must have made a short-cut, or maybe my previous driver had taken the scenic route to maximize the fare. This time it took only about forty-five minutes to get to the airport and our flight to Clark wasn’t until ten past three so we risked eating s
ome food at the airport. It wasn’t a good idea.

  The flight to Clark International Airport was over almost as soon as it began. It was basically an ascent and a descent with nothing much in between. The aircraft seats in the small plane were narrow and rather cramped, but on the other hand there were few passengers. The airport at Clark was larger than I expected and looked new. It was on the site of the old U.S. Airbase so the runway was long enough for the largest modern commercial airliners and there was a Qatar Airways Airbus on the runway to prove it. Most of the International flights were to neighboring Asian destinations like Hong Kong, Bangkok and Seoul, but many of the destinations were domestic ones.

  The small aircraft on which Lucy and I had travelled deposited us on the tarmac and we walked the short distance to the terminal building. Although I only had cabin baggage Lucy had a suitcase checked in so we had a brief wait. An overpriced taxi deposited us at the Holiday Inn just before five o’clock.

  After the hustle and bustle of Manila, Clark was like a curious oasis of calm. Lucy had briefed me about Clark. Like Subic it was a special economic zone. It had its own police, and the governing body was the Clark Development Council, or CDC. As well as an intended magnet for international corporations lured by tax incentives and inexpensive wage bills it was simultaneously being promoted as a tourist destination. There were two golf courses, five casinos and an assortment of hotels and holiday apartments. As we drove to the hotel in our taxi we passed the derelict remains of a number of buildings from U.S. Air force days. The departure of the U.S. troops had coincided with the eruption of nearby Mount Pinatubo which had buried the area under several inches of ash. The new Clark was therefore rising like the mythical phoenix from the ashes. A rather slow-moving phoenix though.

  Our room in the Holiday Inn was exactly what we had expected: a room in a Holiday Inn. We went out for a stroll. There was no breeze and the leaves of the mango trees were still. Many of the trees must have been well over a hundred years old but were keeping the mystery of what they had witnessed over the years to themselves. It was a pleasantly warm evening again and we walked to what was still called the Parade Ground, an oval of several acres where the U.S. troops used to strut their stuff in days that were a distant memory now.

  After our walk we sat in the small bar on the first floor of the hotel. A guitarist and singer were entertaining the mainly Western customers. I’d assumed the customers were tourists who’d come for the golf but it turned out that most were nearby residents. They recommended the restaurant on the top floor of the hotel as being exceptionally good so we booked a table and were more than pleasantly surprised.

  “I’m skeptical about the whole boat thing,” I said as we sat eating in the virtually deserted dining room.

  “Because he can’t remember when the boat was transferred?”

  “Yes, and also because you’d have thought he’d have told the police about it as soon as he was arrested. If what he says is true I find it hard to believe that he’s forgotten the date; and even if he’s forgotten the exact date when the transfer took place why not put the police onto Cary straight away?”

  “Suzie told me he wasn’t confident that the police would carry out a proper investigation; he’s trying to get a lawyer to advise him – or at least he was until she told him you’d agreed to help.”

  “I agreed to come; I don’t know yet if I’ll be able to help. His explanation sounds a bit thin to me. If I was arrested for a serious crime and I had an innocent explanation for what appears to be a damning piece of evidence, I’d tell the police immediately. If what he says is true, Cary could exonerate him immediately.”

  “But if he was responsible for Larry’s death it’s unlikely he’d have returned to the Philippines, don’t you think?”

  “Larry’s body was only found by chance. Whoever was responsible for his death I doubt they expected the body to be found. If Larry was simply reported as a missing person it’s unlikely the police would’ve made much, if any, effort to follow it up.”

  We asked the staff at the reception desk for a driver to take us to Subic the following day and they said they’d provide one from the hotel. If we wanted a driver in and around Subic we’d need to arrange that when we got there. We were told that the journey would take about an hour and the road was good. There’d be no delays other than at the turnpike booths.

  We went to bed early. We had a twin-bedded room, unlike the King size we’d shared in Manila; Lucy had forgotten to ask. As I lay in that netherworld between wakefulness and sleep the little beacon which resides surreptitiously somewhere at the back of my brain began to blink dimly. When that happened I knew it was trying to tell me something, so I paid attention. What it was suggesting to me this time was that perhaps I should visit Hendriks before Cary and find out all about the boat first before asking her about it. If Hendriks had identified the boat as belonging to Sands, and had seen it in the place where it was moored by Porter, then there was a good chance that he knew both of them. He might be the best person to interview first. At least he was more likely to be objective rather than partisan. I had no idea how well Cary knew Porter, nor even if she knew of his arrest; but if she knew the police suspected Porter of killing her husband then it might well influence her objectivity. I hadn’t contacted either of them yet. I assumed that tomorrow being Sunday they’d be fairly easy to get hold of, and while I was still thinking about all this I drifted off to sleep.

  Lucy had promised to keep Suzie up to date on our progress so she called her in Sacramento before we went down to breakfast, having worked out that it would be late afternoon there. She told her about the boat and the fact that Dale had a perfectly innocent explanation for that and that it would probably be only be a matter of days before Dale was released and so on.

  “How’s Suzie?” I said.

  “She seems fine. She sounded relieved and she said to thank you for your help – but I got the impression that she’s moved on. To be honest she seemed a bit distant.”

  “Ships that pass in the night,” I said.

  The buffet breakfast downstairs was at least a zillion times better than the one at the hotel in Manila, which was something of a relief. The hotel car was arranged for ten o’clock and we were packed up and ready when it arrived. I felt as if I was on one of those vacations where you visit eight European countries in ten days. I saw a movie made about a vacation like that once. It was called ‘If it’s Tuesday it Must be Belgium’ or something like that.

  The drive to Subic was a scenic one. The highway led all the way from Clark to Subic past ridiculously green meadows and ridiculously reddish-brown earth with carabao and rice paddies and mountains. The only delay was at the two turnpike booths where, presumably as a joke, someone had decided to set the fees at inconvenient levels. The first was twenty-nine pesos instead of thirty and the second was forty-eight pesos instead of fifty, which meant that everybody had to wait for change. As we passed from the province of Pampanga to Zimbales I briefed Lucy on my plan for the days ahead. I realized it was likely to take days now.

  “So,” I said, “I’ve decided that it would be best to try and see Hendriks first if I can get hold of him. He’s the guy who reported the location of the boat a few days after Sands’ body was found in the ocean. It seems to me that there’s a good chance that he may have known both Sands and Porter. Also, importantly, he’ll be able to tell me where it was berthed. If I can find out when Porter took the berth, then I’ll know more or less when he got the boat.”

  “Why not just ask Cary?”

  “I intend to, but I’d like to know some of the answers before I pose the questions.”

  “Who else are you planning to contact?”

  “The medical examiner, of course, and maybe the bank staff where Sands kept his money. I assume he must have had an account somewhere. I may not learn anything from that, but you never know. If Sands hasn’t accessed his account for a couple of months, it would strengthen the concl
usion that he’s dead – that his was the body recovered from the ocean. If it was a homicide, money may be involved somewhere. Then, of course, I’ll want to talk to anyone who may have seen Sands around the time of his disappearance and try to find out whether he had any enemies. Things like that.”

  “Isn’t that going further than you really need to? I mean Dale’s your client and your job is to make sure he’s cleared of suspicion of the murder. If he wasn’t responsible does it really matter who was? As you said yourself, Sands might not have been murdered at all. It could have been an accident or even a suicide.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been accused of obsessive thoroughness,” I said. “Once I get my teeth into something I find it hard to let go; an investigation becomes like a challenge. As far as I know Subic is like a small island. I mean it’s not literally an island but it’s likely to be a place where everybody knows everybody else’s business or they think they do. I’ve a feeling that when I start to dig I shall find out a lot more about the background to this case.”

  “We could be here all winter,” said Lucy glumly.

  “I can stay here by myself if you like and send you back to the mausoleum.”

  “Two heads are better than one,” Lucy said.

  “Even if one of them belongs to a woman?” I said.

  “Especially if one’s a woman.”

  “So what’s the first thing we need to do to crack the case?” I said.

  “How many guesses do I get?”

  “We need to establish a timeline,” I said. “At the moment there are a lot of things we’re not sure about. We need to find out when Larry disappeared. Not when it was reported, but the last time he was seen by anybody. Then we need to find out when the boat went missing. When was the last time it was seen at Larry’s mooring? When did it show up at Dale’s mooring? Once we get an accurate time-line we’ll be able to start making some progress.”