The Matador Murders (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 4)

by Jerold Last

  "I'll ask you again, Norberto. If you don't give me an answer I like, I'll break the other arm. Then we'll do it again, and you'll answer or I'll break the other leg. The third time, if we get that far, I'll kill you if you don't give me a straight answer. Just nod if you understand me."

  He nodded and I could see fear, as well as pain, in his eyes. He seemed to have quickly gotten into the proper mood to cooperate.

  "What are you doing here in Montevideo, Norberto?"

  "I carry money from here to Chile for my employers," he said haltingly. "They are drug dealers."

  "Very good. You only need to answer two more questions and my very large friend over by our car will drive you to the hospital to get fixed up. Give me some names of the people you work for here in Montevideo and in Santiago."

  Norberto tried to move his arm and moaned in agony. All of the fight in him had disappeared with the intense pain. "I don't know anyone's name in Uruguay. I am just told where to go to pick up the cash. It's always a different place each trip, it's usually a different hombre giving me the money, and it's always a meaningless place like a park or a shopping center so I can't give you an address either. The guy I take orders from in Chile calls himself Bernardo O'Higgins. It's a street name; I don't know his real name. If you ask around in the bars downtown in the neighborhood around the Central Market, someone will know him. If you can convince them you're not a cop, they'll point you in the right direction."

  "Last question, Norberto. Why were you following us?"

  A few more moans prefaced this answer. "I got paid to do it by the same people who gave me the money to take to Chile. They didn't tell me why they wanted me to follow you. They just told me there was extra money in my pay to do this and when and where I was supposed to be. Someone called me a few minutes before you showed up describing all of you so I knew the car I was supposed to follow. They just wanted to know where you went after you left Pocitos. I'm supposed to drive back to Chile with the money and phone them from the first gas station I stop at to tell them where you went.

  "I can't show up like this or let them know what happened here or they'd kill me. You weren't supposed to know I followed you."

  "OK. In a way that's good. We'll be just as happy if they don't know either. My friend will drive you to the hospital in your car, check you in, and give you your car keys. You can phone your friends here in Montevideo and tell them you lost us in the heavy traffic downtown, so you don't know where we went or what we did when we got there. You can drive to Chile whenever you want to. I'll keep your Chilean ID card information. If I ever see you again I'll file charges against you for attempted murder with the Montevideo police, with my friend as a witness. If anybody bothers us or follows us again, I'll assume they are friends of yours and report you to the local police. Is everything perfectly clear?"

  "Yes."

  "Eduardo, please give me the keys to the SUV. Take this pile of garbage to the Hospital de Clinicas and leave his car in the parking lot and him with the car keys. Take a taxi and meet us you know where. Nobody saw or heard anything because the cars blocked any view from either end of the alley, so I think we can live with the deal Norberto and I just made."

  I drove back to the hotel, gave the doorman a 50-peso note (about $2) to get his approval for leaving the car parked illegally out front, and went up to our room. Suzanne and Robert looked like they always looked, except Suzanne was a bit upset. Bruce looked like he'd been in a fight.

  "What happened to you two? Is everyone OK?" I asked.

  "There was what seemed to be an attempted mugging just outside of the hotel. I met Bruce and Robert on the street just after you dropped me off, so I joined them for their walk. We were coming back to the hotel by the back entrance, a much less busy street than the front, when a big thug with a knife came part of the way out of an alley heading right at me and the stroller with the baby in it. Bruce intervened before he got to me, took his knife away from him, and probably broke a few of his bones in the process. Bruce uses his hands a lot more than we do in this kind of fight and his kicks a lot less, so everything happens in very close quarters. There just isn't a lot to see unless you know what to watch for.

  "It all happened so fast I don't think anybody walking on the street realized what had just occurred. We just left the guy in the alley and called Martin Gonzalez to tell him what had happened. He promised to take care of everything."

  "I don't think there's any way the people who had us followed from Pocitos could have gotten someone here that quickly," I observed. "Either it's just a coincidence and it really was an attempted mugging, or there are a couple of different groups of people that don't like us for some reason. Given the crummy economy and all of the people living in poverty here, a random mugging of a couple of rich looking tourists could be all that was. Thanks Bruce, and you don't have to worry about any repercussions from hurting the would-be mugger. The man we're here to help is the police officer in charge of cases like this."

  I filled Suzanne in on what had happened to Eduardo and me after we dropped her off, emphasizing the skills I had displayed in Spanish when I interrogated Norberto and deemphasizing the extent of the damage I had inflicted upon him.

  "Thank you very much for teaching me Spanish and for some of those karate moves I used. I'm getting a whole lot better at both."

  Suzanne smiled, excused herself for a few minutes of filling milk bottles for Robert, who was still taking his afternoon nap across the hall with Bruce, and asked me to let her know when Eduardo got back so we could discuss what we needed to do next.

  A half-hour later Eduardo, with Martin Gonzalez accompanying him, came up to our room. I collected Suzanne and we sat down for a conference.

  "How's it going, Martin?" I asked. "Are you completely reinstated as a detective lieutenant or are they still giving you a hard time?"

  "On paper I'm completely reinstated. I still don't have a partner assigned to me and my former colleagues are acting weird, but that will stop after some time has passed, especially if we catch the guy who really did it. We may have lucked out in that case. The cops in Canelones, the next province over to the east, found a body. He'd been shot. In his pocket was a 9mm semi-automatic pistol issued by the Montevideo police that originally belonged to Jose Gonzalez. The corpse was also carrying another gun in a shoulder holster. Our slow moving ballistics lab is trying to match the bullets that came out of the gun in the shoulder holster from the new body with the slugs they took out of Jose. If they match I'm officially and unofficially off the hook for Jose's murder."

  "That's good news, isn't it?" asked Suzanne.

  "I think so, especially together with Roger's demonstration about how the locked room murder could be explained, which I shared with my Captain as soon as I heard about the body in Canelones," answered Martin.

  "I've spent all day nursing Robert, filling milk bottles, and thinking. I have a few theories and an idea I'd like to bounce off you guys if nobody minds. Would that be OK?"

  "Sure."

  "Roger, when we came down here to Montevideo, Eduardo and Martin were assuming that there was something sinister about Andres Sanchez's buying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of land in the tri-Country area around the Uruguay and Parana Rivers. My first thought was that they might be trying to control the water supply to farmers along the rivers, and a few big cities. Maybe they could corner the market on supplying water to the area? But that's not very likely. It rains a lot here all year round, so there's not a lot of irrigated agriculture. This is the second largest watershed in South America after the Amazon Basin. That particular theory doesn't make a lot of sense.

  "My second theory was that they were thinking of building a huge hydroelectric dam, like Itaipu just above Iguazu Falls, so they could make cheap power and sell it to the surrounding countries. If they owned all the land along the rivers they wouldn't need three different governments to give them permission to build a big dam that would have massive ecological effects on the r
egions up- and downstream of the dam. That actually made a lot of sense when you realize that hydroelectric dams usually become less and less efficient as they start accumulating the dirt and silt that has flowed down the rivers against the dam. That process makes them lose a lot of the flow through the turbines that make power. The effective life of Itaipu Dam is probably only 20 more years or so, maybe less. So, there's one theory that I think we have to consider.

  "My third theory was that they were thinking about building some kind of factories along the rivers on the land they owned that would pollute the rivers, but who would complain if they owned all of the affected properties? This isn't all that off the wall either. Remember the paper mills Uruguay wanted to build on the Uruguay River a few years ago that almost started a war between them and Argentina over the water pollution that might occur?"

  "Oh yes," replied Eduardo, "I remember it all too well. There is still a lot of bad blood between Uruguay and Argentina and a pending lawsuit or two if I remember correctly. Uruguay wanted to diversify its agriculture from beef grazing the Pampas to make steaks and roasts to tree farming eucalyptus and pine to make paper. They saw that as a way to deal with massive unemployment in the rural areas outside of Montevideo and in the cities in the interior of the country. They had a Finnish and a Spanish company lined up to build and operate two paper mills on the Uruguay River and had started planting the trees. Argentina objected to the plants being built because they would pollute the river and blockaded the bridges so trucks couldn't drive between Uruguay and Argentina to force the Uruguayans to cancel their plans. Almost everybody assumed the Argentine government was afraid of competition from modern paper mills and was trying to protect its own interests in much older paper mills on the Argentine side of the river.

  "I think the bridges are now usable again and the mills have been built, but things were delayed for 5-6 years and somebody has probably been paid off."

  Suzanne mulled this over for a bit, then continued theorizing.

  "What if we hypothesize that we had it all backwards? What if the land purchases are not about buying land but are all about someone having tons of money they had to spend on something somewhere in the Mercosur region? What can you spend that much money on down here? Nobody trusts the stock market in Argentina; everything in that country is corrupt. Uruguay doesn't even have a stock market. The only way to get rid of that much money is by buying real estate. What's better and less conspicuous than rural land that nobody else wants to invest in during the current worldwide recession?

  "If we start over and assume that people are dying here because they're involved in some way in a gigantic money laundering scheme, where does that line of reasoning take us? Hey, Eduardo, are all of the Mercosur countries getting their drogas from one big cartel of drug dealers or does each country run separately and completely on its own?"

  "Some of each, Suzanne. The bigger, wealthier countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Chile have their own drug importation and sales infrastructure. The smaller countries like Uruguay and Paraguay have local gangs with local leadership, but they are supplied by, and ultimately answer to, the big cartels in Argentina and Chile. And the big boys in Argentina and Chile are in turn dependent on bigger cartels in Colombia and Ecuador for their supplies of cocaine and other drugs. Given that we just tripped over a Chilean connection in an alley only a few blocks away from the hotel, I think you're on the right track here."

  "There's something else going on too," Suzanne continued. "Andres Sanchez acted like he was scared this morning. We already talked about there being too much security at his place for him to be doing anything completely innocent. This business of having us followed is a little strange. It would be stranger yet that he used outside talent for the job if he thought we were suspicious. It almost seems that we may have walked into the middle of a gang war here, and that there may be a couple of factions involved in the drug trade or in money laundering fighting it out. Maybe the old banker wasn't worried about us being cops, but was worried that we were working for the other side. If that were the case, it would have made sense for him to trust a bottom level Chilean crook more than his own people to follow us.

  "You have connections in Chile, Eduardo, as I remember from the last time we were here in South America and we spent some time in Northern Chile chasing a serial killer," Suzanne added. "Do you think they could get us in contact with some of the local drug hierarchy in Santiago for a friendly chat about what's going on here in Montevideo? And maybe whether there's a connection to the drug industry in Salta, Argentina? I haven't forgotten that my father was murdered a few years ago because he got involved with drug dealers in Salta. What do you think, Roger? Should we and Eduardo fly over to Santiago for a quick visit to check out their drug scene?"

  “As I remember, Suzanne, the last time we were in South America we promised ourselves a real visit to Santiago," I replied. "That last time we just had a few hours there. It looks like we can combine business with pleasure if you’re OK with leaving Robert here under Bruce's watchful care for a day or two while we travel to Chile. I don’t think the business part will take longer than a few hours.”

  “If I can use some of my time today to stockpile as much milk as I can for Robert, and Bruce makes up the difference while we're gone with solid food and formula, I think Robert will be alright. And if I take a pump with me to relieve the pressure, that sounds like it could work for me and that I'll be alright.”

  "OK," I suggested, "Eduardo, Suzanne and I will take a couple of days in Chile to see the sights and follow the drug connection by chatting with Bernardo O'Higgins and whoever else Eduardo's connections may turn up to help us. Martin, your job is to follow up on looking for connections between Andres Sanchez and the local drug industry and between the Sanchez Bank and any large scale money laundering you can find evidence of. And maybe you should offer to cooperate with the Canelones cops in their investigation of the most recent killing. Does everybody agree?"

  Heads nodded and we were all set.

  “There’s something else I should emphasize,” exclaimed Martin with some urgency. “Montevideo is the second safest national capital city in the world, just behind Tokyo. We don’t have a high homicide rate under normal circumstances. But these aren't normal circumstances. In just the last week we’ve had what is normally almost a complete year’s worth of gunshot murders, which is totally unacceptable in a civilized city like this. And you three are really the only ones making any progress on figuring out what's going on here. I don’t care what you do or how you do it, it’s urgent that this gang related killing has to be brought to an end. Even though you’ve probably completely cleared me of suspicion in Jose Gonzalez’ death, there’s a lot of work still to be done on his case, which I assume is linked to the rest of the violence occurring here in my city. Even if Jose was crooked garbage, he was still a policeman. We can’t just let the perps kill any of us and get away with it.

  "I know your primary goal is to help Eduardo and me sort out the motives and the individuals behind the land purchases that you came down here to solve, but I beg you to also do whatever you can to help me stop this senseless gang war before we end up with the killing of innocent bystanders.”

  Roger looked especially thoughtful as he nodded in agreement. "I have some thoughts about that, Martin. We clearly have two rival gangs here fighting it out who will control the local and lucrative market to sell drugs in Montevideo. The leader of the first gang might be Andres Sanchez, or he might just be in charge of the money part. The new gang is a complete mystery except that they have connections in Chile. We can call the leader of this new gang Mr. X. One of our priorities has to be figuring out who Mr. X is, and somehow proving it. There are a few pretty extreme approaches to accomplishing this I've been mulling over. We'll talk more about this after we get back from Chile."

  Chapter 8. There's a lot to be said for a gang war

  Mr. X sat on a couch sipping scotch from a glass. Things were working out we
ll. The recent death of Carlos Cavernas removed a loose end that could have revealed the true identity of the boss. The previous death of Jose Gonzalez removed a crooked cop who couldn't be trusted by anybody on either side of the game. Now it was time to plan the next move. It seemed to come down to one of two choices.

  "Should I wait a little longer and get more people who would be loyal to me at crunch time into the key positions in the old gang?"

  That would be the safe choice. The more powerful the better when one is considering regime change. But that would also mean being very, very patient and escalating the current war. So far the police had stayed out of the gang war. There were certainly no guarantees that the laissez faire attitude of the Montevideo Police Department would continue, especially with Jose Gonzalez no longer in a position to sabotage any police investigation.

  "Should I kill Andres Sanchez?"

  All of the killings that had taken place until now, except for Carlos and Jose, were designed to move new blood that had no loyalty to the old leadership into the middle management positions of the old gang. The next step would be a hostile takeover with enough muscle in reserve to get all of the new guys to rally behind Mr. X's leadership. It was time to create a power vacuum at the top to move into.