by C I Dennis
“Segundo was one of the best players in the world,” Susanna said. “He got into betting at Harvard, and he dropped out in senior year to go play all over Europe. My father finally persuaded him to finish college, and then go on to law school.”
“Why would Gustavo want me to know that? It’s just a game, right?”
“Segundo told me that he could make a hundred thousand dollars in a single match,” she said. She was riding shotgun and Roberto was squeezed into the back, quietly working on the tablet. He had hooked it up to my MacBook and had said that he’d have it hacked before we got home.
“So he made a living playing it? He won more than he lost?”
“Yes, for about a year. He lost some matches, I’m sure. But he was so good that nobody in the country would play against him. He had to go to Monaco, or to Egypt, where the best players lived, and even they wouldn’t play him after a while. So he went back to school.”
“A backgammon hustler,” I said. “I didn’t know they existed.”
When I had arrived at the hospital to collect Roberto, Gustavo Arguelles still hadn’t been able to utter a word, and had been drifting in and out of sleep. But he’d had a brief waking moment, long enough for me to tell him about his dead brother-in-law, and he had waved his wrist as if he were holding a pencil. I understood, and found him a Sharpie and a scrap of paper, and he wrote it out, letter by letter in labored, uneven handwriting: This is about backgammon. That’s what Segundo told me. Roberto’s father was giving me all the help that he could, even in his heavily medicated state.
“I always thought that backgammon was luck,” I said to Susanna. “There are only a certain number of moves, right? It’s not like chess.”
“My brother used to say that the game itself was eighty percent luck. Everybody who is any good knows the moves. It’s the doubling die that is the secret.”
“Doubling die?”
“You roll the regular dice for the moves,” she said. “But there’s a special die that has a 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 on it. When you think that you have the advantage, you can double the bet. So in one game a thousand-dollar bet can become sixty-four thousand dollars.”
“So don’t both players have the same odds? Especially if everyone knows the same moves?”
“We started playing when we were kids. He could beat me every time, because he played so fast, and he would rush me, and I’d make a mistake. He does that to his opponents, and after a while he wears them down. He goads them into playing faster than they should, and they screw up. He’s like a machine.”
“I still don’t get why Gustavo would have written that. What would this have to do with Lilian?”
“No idea,” Susanna Pimentel said. It was only two in the afternoon but she already looked tired, and her makeup was streaked from when she’d seen Gustavo and hadn’t been able to hold back her tears. “Lili doesn’t even play anymore. Not since we were all children.”
“Lilian played backgammon?”
“Oh yes. She could beat Segundo, and it drove him crazy. It’s probably what motivated him to get so good at it. The poor kid could never keep his allowance for more than a day.”
*
Susanna and Barbara hadn’t met before, but they settled onto two barstools at the kitchen counter and began to talk with the intimacy of old friends. At face value it was an unlikely combination: the Russian literature professor and the forty-something nursing student who had traveled a bumpy road through life. Barbara had grown up dirt poor in Jacksonville, and had only made it as far as high school, but she was an avid if slow reader, and if you read like that you can hold your own in a conversation with anybody. Susanna took an immediate shine to Royal, and the three of them were settling in nicely on the couch while Roberto did his computer forensic work on the back patio. I sat with him at the glass table and worked on my sister’s sweater, which was starting to look like an overgrown potholder, and I wondered if I had been too ambitious.
So far the tablet hadn’t revealed Lilian’s whereabouts, but it had definitely revealed some interesting shots of Chloe Heffernan, who was a very attractive woman. The photographer had used a decent camera and a professional lens that had kept her features in focus while blurring the background in an appealing way: it directed the viewer’s attention to the model, not the setting, and the result was breathtaking. It was also highly educational for Roberto, as many of the photos of Mrs. Heffernan’s “features” had left little or nothing to the imagination. Roberto was trying his darndest to be cool about it, but I decided that it would be prudent to take the tablet away from him and have a look myself before his hair spontaneously caught on fire.
“Can you sharpen up the background?” I asked him. “I want to know where these were taken.”
“Buzzkill,” he said, grinning.
“This is work, dude. Not recreation. You can look at titties on your own time.”
“Porn is for losers, anyway,” he said. “There’s an EXIF file in the images. It has the geodata embedded in it. Give me a sec.”
He tapped at my MacBook, which was tethered to the tablet. “West of here. It’s on this map.”
He passed the computer over to me, and I saw what he was looking at. A red dot pulsed at the northwest corner of Blue Cypress Lake—the Moonshiner’s Camp.
“I figured,” I said. “Now I need you to delete all these.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. I made someone a promise.”
“OK,” he said. We liked to joke around, but he knew when I meant it.
“Next up is backgammon,” I said. “I want to know if there’s anything in there that mentions it.”
Roberto tapped at the keys for several minutes. “Yeah, it’s in here,” he said. “My uncle was way into that. There are some websites he went to, and a bunch of emails. This is weird though—let me check this out.”
“What is weird?”
“One sec,” he said. He tapped at the keys. “OK. He was emailing somebody in Cuba. Not through Nauta.”
“What’s Nauta?”
“That’s the Cuban telephone company’s Internet service. Most traffic routes through there. But this is different.”
“How?”
“It’s a diplomatic email service,” Roberto said. “And it’s encrypted, big time.”
“Can you get into it?”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s a six-pack of Cokes in it for you. Maybe a whole case.”
“Forget that. If I can hack this, you owe me a six-pack of PBR.”
“Pabst Blue Ribbon?” I said to my underage friend. “No way. If I’m buying you a six of beer, I’d just as soon not poison you on the first outing.”
*
The whole house was asleep at ten thirty except for me. I was sitting in my recliner, trying to put everything together. Lilian was gone and quite possibly kidnapped, and we were coming up on a week with no real leads. Gustavo Arguelles was laid up in a hospital bed, barely able to communicate. Susanna and Roberto were safe in my house but were essentially hostages to the events. Roberto’s uncle and grandfather were dead.
So far, I knew that Segundo Pimentel had been having an affair with a police detective’s wife for nine years. I also knew that he had been a backgammon sharp, and he might have made a few enemies in the process. What did that have to do with his sister’s disappearance? Nothing? It didn’t seem relevant, despite Gustavo’s scrawled message. Maybe I just didn’t get it. I still had very little hard evidence to go on, and I had checked in with Bobby Bove earlier in the evening to see if the missing persons search had turned up anything, but it hadn’t. Lilian Arguelles could be anywhere.
She could also be dead, like her father and brother, although I couldn’t allow myself to even think about that. I needed a break in this case. Yes, it was a case, and I was back on the job. I wasn’t happy about the circumstances, but I also felt more alive than I had in months, and I knew that this was perhaps the most important part of my recove
ry—the mental part, in addition to the physical. Megan Rumsford could work me over and massage me all she wanted, but the real progress would only be made when I was back to being myself, Vince Tanzi, the guy who could solve other people’s problems—albeit, while avoiding my own. Megan had nailed it when she’d said that you could die from not doing what you loved to do.
I thought about Megan, and what I was going to do about her, and how I should handle what I felt would be a healthy, necessary separation from her services, for both of us. She had crossed the boundaries of our friendship, for god-knows-what reason. Why would a babe like her even bat an eyelash at someone my age?
And I also had to keep my libido in check, or I would risk everything. Sure, Barbara and I had hit a speed bump, but things now seemed to be on the mend. I might even knock on the nursery door to see if I could entice her back to our matrimonial bed. Even though we would both be tired, we might still summon the energy to make love while being quiet enough to not wake the baby, or the Pimentel family refugees. It had been way too long.
My cellphone buzzed in my pocket, and I drew it out for a look.
I’m in trouble, it said. The text was from Megan Rumsford.
Where are you? I sent back.
21st Street, she sent back. I’m outside Cunningham’s.
Cunningham’s Pool and Darts was arguably Vero Beach’s finest dive bar, for a variety of reasons: the music was loud, the beer was cheap, the pool tables were level, and everybody was your friend. I’d hoisted a few PBRs there, back in my deputy days.
Five minutes, I sent. Whether or not I needed to fire Megan I still liked her, and I would do anything for her. She had been a huge help to me, like Barbara had said. I opened the door to the garage, started my car, and sped out of the driveway into the damp, moonless night.
*
“Get yourself a cue and let me give you a thrashing.” I had hustled to get downtown to the bar, and was sweating when I entered. Megan Rumsford stood by the side of a pool table, wearing a sleeveless green top with tight denim shorts and holding a cue stick. She didn’t look like she was in distress—she looked like a million bucks, after taxes.
“That shouldn’t be too difficult,” I said. “Do you want to talk first?”
“Afterward.”
I took a cue stick off the wall while she racked the balls. “Nine ball?” she asked.
“Sure.” I dabbed at the end of the cue with blue chalk as if I knew what I was doing.
“You can break,” she said.
“Got it,” I said. I positioned the cue ball and hit it hard, into the group of balls. The nine ball obligingly rolled into the far corner pocket, which was an automatic win.
“Dumb luck,” she said, laughing.
“That’s the only kind I have.”
Megan re-racked the balls and took the break. Her shirt draped open at the front as she leaned over, and I glimpsed her bra. She took her attention away from her shot, momentarily, and smiled up at me. Then she gave the cue a fierce thrust and knocked in two balls on the break. Within a couple of minutes she had run the table, ending with the nine ball, and a guy in a Florida State hat at the next table gave a whistle of appreciation. Her game was fast but deliberate, and I figured that she could beat anyone in the place, especially if she flashed her lacy black bra at them like she had at me. Some people sure know how to ruin a guy’s concentration.
“Where’d you learn how to play like that?” I asked. “That was amazing.”
“We had a table, growing up. Tie-breaker?”
“That’s enough for me.”
“Let’s find a seat at the bar,” she said. “I’ll buy you a beer and you can continue telling me how amazing I am.”
“You said you were in trouble?”
“We’ll get to that part.”
*
One beer became a pitcher, which in turn became a series of pitchers, and the two of us exchanged our increasingly incoherent life stories at the bar while we drank. I knew that I had absolutely no business getting hammered with a vivacious young woman on a Saturday night in plain sight of anyone who might wander by. You do that and you might as well take out an ad in the morning paper: Attention Gossips! Vince Tanzi was all over some babe last night at Cunningham’s, and it sure wasn’t his wife! People liked to talk, and I saw several people who I knew. But I didn’t give a damn, and it wasn’t just the beer. I was enjoying myself, even though I was wondering why I’d been called out in the middle of the night.
Megan had grown up on a farm in northern Vermont, where her father dabbled at raising sheep but mostly watched the stock ticker on CNBC. She had quit college and had bounced from one job to another until she’d taken a massage course, which had convinced her to get her P.T. degree from the University of Vermont. She said she’d moved to Florida because she was tired of the northern winters, which was also a part of the reason that I had quit the Barre, Vermont police force almost thirty years ago.
We swapped details about our Green Mountain upbringing—I was the son of a blue-collar stonecutter, and she was the daughter of a blue-blood heir to a company that manufactured tractor wheels. Megan liked to smoke pot, and I liked my beer. She listened to Lady Gaga, and I listened to every possible kind of music except Lady Gaga. I’d been married twice, and—she refused to answer the question, when the subject came up. In fact, the conversation stopped dead.
“You OK?” I said. The third pitcher was now down to about an inch of beer, but I was sober enough to know that I’d stepped in something.
“This is the trouble part,” she said. “I think I made a big mistake.”
“How so?”
“You’ll hear about it, sooner or later,” she said. “Probably from your wife.”
“Barbara?”
“Goddamn, Vince, you are so sexy,” she said, slurring slightly. “And I’m not saying that because I’m drunk. The alcohol has nothing to do with it. You just are.”
“Megan—”
“You want to fire me, I know.”
How did she know that? “Listen, I—”
“Let’s go outside,” she said. “I’m parked in the back.”
She took my arm and steered me between the pool tables, which were all busy with players, and we had to jostle our way through the onlookers. Megan pushed open a metal door that said “Emergency Exit”, and we were suddenly thrust into a quiet, sultry Florida night, the only noise being the rustling of palm fronds. “My Jeep is over there,” she said. “Come on.”
“Do you want me to drive you? My car’s out front.”
“No.”
“I should drive you,” I said. “I know all the cops, if we get stopped.”
“Get in the car, Vince.” She gave me her P.T. drill sergeant look.
I climbed into the passenger seat and she got in next to me. “You can fire me,” she said. “You’re right. I got too close. I could lose my license for the shit I’ve done.”
“You’re good at what you do,” I said. “Barbara thinks—”
“Would you just shut up about Barbara?” Megan said, her voice rising. “Come over here.”
She put her arms around my neck and pulled me close to her, across the center console. Our faces were inches apart. “I’ll let you fire me, but I want a kiss,” she said. “Just a friendly little kiss. Because we’re friends.”
What do you do in a situation like that? Jerk your head back and say no? Rejecting her would only make it worse.
I closed my eyes and let it happen. She thrust her tongue deep into my mouth, aggressively, and grabbed my wrist, pushing my hand up under her shirt and over the lacy black bra. “Touch me,” she said. With her free hand she unsnapped the bra from behind, and she pushed my fingers over her nipple.
“Megan,” I said, trying to break free, but she kissed me again, hard. I felt like I was going to explode unless she let me go—partly from the shock, partly from the guilt, but also partly because I had never been kissed like that by anyone.
; Tanzi’s Tip #5: It’s not just a friendly little kiss when the other person is licking your tonsils.
She had covered my hand with hers and was making me massage her breast, and then she began to convulse, and her arms and legs started to flail wildly. What the hell?
I’d had EMT training as a deputy, and I tried to remember what to do when someone had a seizure. You weren’t supposed to restrain them, you cleared away the furniture, you kept them from falling, none of which applied. I was scared out of my wits, and I took the phone out of my pocket to call an ambulance.
“What are you doing?” Megan said. She had stopped shaking, and was staring at the phone in my hand.
“Calling for help,” I said. “You had a seizure.”
“That wasn’t a seizure, you idiot,” she said. “That was an orgasm.”
Oh my god. Was that possible? “Look, Megan—”
“Just go,” she said. “Get out of the car.” She was trying to refasten her bra behind her back.
“I’m—”
“Get the hell out of here before I smack you,” she interrupted. “You’re firing me, so you can just fuck off.”
I climbed out of the Jeep and limped across the parking lot. My shuffle had gotten noticeably worse, no doubt because of the three pitchers of beer. But any buzz that I’d had before was gone now because of what I had allowed to take place: I had just done the dumbest thing ever. God help me.
Maybe not the dumbest, God might have responded, but it had to be in the top ten.
*
Getting home was something of a challenge seeing how I had lubricated myself enough at Cunningham’s to allow the car to easily glide past a red light or a stop sign, and I crawled along at twenty miles an hour. That was always a giveaway back when I was patrolling the bars as a deputy—the drunks overcompensated, going way under the speed limit, and we would nail them. I knew better than to drive in this condition, but I wasn’t about to call Barbara, or anyone else. If I got popped for DUI it would serve me right for being such a complete jackass with Megan Rumsford. I was still in shock over the whole thing, and I was especially disgusted with myself about one aspect in particular: