by Jerold Last
I went back for the second guy, who was in even worse shape than his partner. He got to sit upright in the shotgun seat. I fastened both sets of seat belts to keep both of the unconscious men sitting up, and locked the car doors. The keys were in the ignition and the car still worked, but there was no way either of them was going to be fit to drive for the next few weeks.
I walked back to our car. Suzanne stood waiting for me. “We have three choices here,” I explained to Suzanne. “We can drive both cars back and take these guys to the police. That’s probably the right thing to do in the legal sense, but technically they haven’t committed any crimes in Argentina and we have. We might end up in jail for quite a while and that’s not something I want to add to our list of experiences. Or, we can try to get some answers to our questions. Short of torture I don’t think we’ll get any answers from these guys.
“The last choice is the one I’m voting for. We leave them here and get back to Salta. Someone will find them eventually and take them to a hospital. It should be a few days or longer before they get back to Salta. With the information in their passports and wallets, which I have in my pocket, we’ll be able to backtrack them in Los Angeles. Without any I.D.s it’s going to take them a long time to get back to the United States, so we should be able to enjoy the rest of our holiday without anyone else following us or trying to kill us.”
Suzanne looked closely at me. “What if a big bus comes down the hill and can’t stop in time?”
“We’re a lot better off if that’s what happens. Then nobody in Los Angeles will be warned that we may know too much. I thought about driving them over the cliff myself after I put them back in the car. But I just couldn’t do it. I’m not a cold-blooded killer and couldn’t murder both of them after they stopped being an immediate threat to us. But if that car happens to be in a crash and goes over the cliff as an act of God, I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it. How about you?”
“I trust your judgment. I’ve trusted you to make all of our decisions so far on this trip, and you haven’t disappointed me yet.”
We got back in our car, conveniently downhill from the larger car, now stopped in the middle of the highway. Carefully, I drove our car the rest of the way downhill back towards the rental agency in Salta. This was no time to get into an accident or get a speeding ticket. Suzanne was unusually quiet for the next hour or two.
During the drive back to Campo Quijano, I asked Suzanne to take a quick look at what was in the wallets and passports we had stolen. The passports had names and addresses for two residents of Los Angeles.
“Very good so far,” I said. “I like the fact they’re from Los Angeles and aren’t hired guns from somewhere else.”
Each of the wallets contained several hundred dollars in cash and the equivalent amount in pesos, a California driver’s license with names, photos, and addresses that agreed with the passports, credit cards, and bits and pieces of plastic that meant little in our search. For the first time since we began this trip, I started to feel that by the time we went home we might have some answers to the questions that brought us here to Salta. We had a good lead to follow that could take us back to the man or men that murdered Robert Foster and had already found what we believed to be the answer to the question of why he’d been killed.
We got back to Salta that night and returned the rental car, which was a lot easier to do than finding a parking place near the square. Then we walked over to the Tastil travel agency to change our plane reservations. Suzanne and I reaped the benefits of being out of season tourists. There was plenty of space available on all of the flights we needed so we were ready to go home tomorrow on a set of connecting flights that was the reverse of our incoming trip.
From the Tastil agency we walked over to the Hotel Regidor where we were welcomed back for another night in the same room we were in before. It was dinnertime and we were both hungry. Dinner was one more lomo dinner for the road in a nice restaurant a block south of the hotel we’d passed several times. At the waiter’s suggestion we tried an interesting red wine from Uruguay that I’d never tasted before, the Anat Tannat varietal from the Currau winery in Montevideo. It was intensely flavored and delicious, with the darkest color I’d ever seen in a red wine.
As we sipped our wine and waited for the food to come to the table, I recalled Suzanne’s role in today’s fight. “I’m sorry I doubted your martial arts skills that first night here in Salta after we ate at the Restaurante Folklorico. You did a very good job on the mountain today. Most people would have hesitated when they needed to act. You’ve got the makings of a good street fighter.”
“Thank you,” she replied, “I appreciate the occasional compliment a whole lot. And I have to admit I was pretty scared during that car chase.”
“Me too,” I replied.
After dinner we walked back to the hotel and up to our room. Both of us slept well that night. It was time to go home. The next morning there was time for one quick stop after checking out before we were due at the airport for our flight to Buenos Aires, connecting to California. We walked over to Lieutenant Garcia’s office in the Cabildo.
He was in his usual position sitting at his desk and welcomed us warmly. “Have you found out anything new to tell me?”
I took the lead in the conversation this time. “We’ve been to Cafayate, a place that Suzanne’s father visited, but couldn’t find anything that told us who he visited or what he did while he was there. All our leads in Salta are exhausted, so we’re going home later this morning, just as soon as we finish here. It was a lovely vacation in Salta and we’d enjoy coming back some day to visit, but our days as detectives here are over.”
“Muy bien,” said Garcia. “It is very good that you have made this decision and I am glad I could be of assistance to you. I wish you both a safe trip home.”
“Thank you for all your help. We really appreciate it. I’d like to leave you my card so you can contact us if you learn anything more about who was responsible for Robert Foster’s death.”
“I will be happy to do that,” the Lieutenant said. He put my business card in the case file.
Both of us stood up to go. Suzanne thanked the Lieutenant and said goodbye. We walked back towards the hotel’s taxi stand.
Chapter12.Back in Los Angeles
It was the day after we returned to Los Angeles from Argentina. Thanks to four hours of jet lag, I got to work in my office a good deal earlier than usual, and was sitting at my desk. I pulled out the passports and the contents of the two wallets we had liberated on the road from Santa Rosa de Tastil. In theory, I could have accessed the sites I was going to check now from anywhere in the world. However, it seemed wise to be careful not to create any potential links between two badly damaged (or worse) crooks and the IP address of my laptop computer in Argentina, just in case some cop ever got curious.
The first passport was for the blond guy, Gunnar Lindholm. I accessed a database that checked for credit rating, criminal convictions, and a lot of other miscellaneous stuff. All I needed was his social security number from a document in his wallet and his name, both of which were right in front of me. His credit rating was pretty good. He had a criminal record, having been convicted of assault and manslaughter plus a few misdemeanors. Lindholm was a career criminal and a bad guy who seemed to like hurting other people.
The second passport belonged to the dark guy, Henry Corso. He also carried his social security card in his wallet. You’d have thought that experienced criminals like these two would take more precautions against identity theft. His credit score was quite a bit less than Gunnar’s, but the criminal record looked very similar. His assault conviction included “and battery”, and his manslaughter conviction was for vehicular manslaughter, but he too was a career criminal and a bad guy who hurt other people.
I wasn’t particularly surprised that both of the guys who had followed us were heavy hitters, but the fact that both were known killers started me thinking about a few what ifs. Was it
possible this hadn’t been their first trip to Argentina? Had one or both of them ever been to Salta previously before they followed us there? They seemed to know their way around. They knew how to hire local thugs like the ones that attacked Suzanne and me outside the restaurant our first night in town. But, there didn’t seem to be any local connections between the drug dealers in Los Angeles and their counterparts in Salta. When they wanted to do more than just scare us, they did it themselves. If the local drug dealers didn’t kill Suzanne’s father, could Lindholm and/or Corso also have followed Robert Foster there and been involved in his murder?
I picked up the phone and called a woman I knew who worked for American Airlines and was putting her daughter through college as a single mother. She had helped me to obtain information previously, even if slightly illegally, a few times in the past for a small fee.
We made some small talk for a minute. “Hi Arlene, this is Roger Bowman. How are you and your daughter doing?”
Finally, she asked me what I wanted. “Can you check whether a couple of guys whose names I know flew to Argentina on American Airlines in the last three months?”
There was a long pause. “I can do better than that. All of the major US airlines now share a single reservation system. If they flew there on any of the US airlines or their international code-share partners, I can retrieve the information.”
“Can you do this over the phone?”
There was another pause, but shorter this time. Clearly there was a supervisor within hearing distance. “No, you’ll have to come to the airport and pay in advance for your ticket.”
Making a mental note to stop at the bank and get some extra cash, preferably in the form of $100 bills, I told her I’d drive over to LAX around lunchtime if that were convenient for her. She agreed to help me with my reservations then.
After a short stop at the bank, which was less than two blocks away from my office, I drove to LAX. Using city streets, which were busy but not gridlocked, the trip took less than half an hour. I parked in the central parking structure and walked over to the American Airlines terminal. Arlene was there behind the counter, so I walked over and got on the end of the line in front of her.
About 5 minutes later she was asking me what I needed. I handed her a piece of paper on which I had written the two names from the passports and their home addresses, as well as Robert Foster’s name and address. She checked the paper and started clicking keys on the computer keyboard. The computer chugged for about twenty seconds, then printed out three pages. She handed them to me and asked, “Are your reservations what you wanted, sir?”
I looked at the lists she had printed. Both Lindholm and Corso had flown a few domestic flights, all within California, in the last three months. More interesting were the two international flights to Argentina and back they had flown on together. The recent flight activity to Buenos Aires was identical to our trip from Los Angeles. The earlier date they departed was exactly one week after the time Robert Foster had left for Argentina and begun his quest to sell his idea to the local drug dealers. Their return flight was the day after his death. Bingo!
I looked up at Arlene from the paperwork I’d just scanned. “The reservations are exactly what I wanted. Thank you very much.”
I reached over to shake her hand and passed her a tightly folded $100 bill.
“Thank you, sir,” she replied as she shook my hand. “I hope you have a very pleasant flight.”
Retrieving my car from the airport garage, I drove back to the office to spend some more time on the Internet. While I had the computer cranked up I looked for the Salta daily news on line. It took a while but I found it. This was a search whose record I did not want to leave on my laptop while we were still in Argentina, just in case their computer forensics were better than I thought they were. I checked the date of our visit to Santa Rosa de Tastil and the two days afterwards. The brief news article in Spanish was there, dated the next day. A bus and car had a fiery crash on Highway 51. The two unidentified men in the car were killed instantly. No one on the bus had serious injuries.
The follow-up story the following day had the crash victims still unidentified. The car was rented for cash in Salta, so there were no credit card records. The driver’s license information turned out to be forged, so the real identity and nationality of the driver remained unknown. The rental agency was able to describe the driver as a tourist, but that was it. Both bodies had been burned beyond recognition. It was a mystery, but the car was fully insured. No one on any of the various police forces involved seemed to have a high priority for further investigating a tragic accident that occurred in the middle of nowhere, rather than in a specific police jurisdiction. The news story seemed to just disappear from the Internet after the preliminary follow-up.
I called Suzanne at UCLA. After some meaningless small talk, I invited her out to dinner to discuss the case. She agreed to meet me at the restaurant I suggested.
That night, over Thai food, we talked about the new information I’d found out that day from Arlene. “I contacted someone that I’ve used before who works for the airlines, and got some information from her slightly illegally. She looked at the reservation records to find out where and when a couple of people whose names I gave her had flown in the last three months. It turns out that our two friends who followed us from Los Angeles were in Argentina on the night your father was killed. Furthermore, they flew back to Los Angeles the day after he was killed. That’s either a huge coincidence, or they’re probably the actual guys who killed your father. Unfortunately, that’s what’s called circumstantial evidence and isn’t going to get the police excited. However, it’s another piece of the puzzle, and as far as I’m concerned it’s the final answer you were looking for when you hired me.”
Suzanne played with her fork. “I agree with you. What do we do next?” she asked.
I tried to look thoughtful. “That’s an excellent question.”
I dipped a large piece of Spring Roll in spicy peanut sauce and chewed it carefully. “To be honest with you, we’ve been very lucky in our detective work so far. I must admit that I didn’t think we were going to find out much about anything when I first took this case.”
Suzanne seemed to be lost in thought for a minute or two. “OK, Sherlock,” she said, “I hired you to help me figure out the who and the why of my father’s murder. I think we both agree that we now know the why, and probably who did it, even if a lot of what we think is just guesswork. What do you think will happen when Lindholm and Corso don’t show up here in Los Angeles right behind us?”
“That’s another very good question. I hope the answer will be absolutely nothing if their associates don’t directly connect us with their disappearance. There isn’t any obvious reason for the local drug bosses to think that we could have staged an accident with two tough criminals who were supposed to follow us, and maybe kill us.
“The police in Argentina will eventually identify both of them. When they don’t show up for their regularly scheduled flight home or when the hotel they were staying at gets nervous that they skipped out on their bill, the police will be notified. Argentina keeps pretty tight passport controls at their borders, so they can figure out quite easily who entered the country but didn’t leave it as scheduled. At that point they’ll investigate and figure out that the description of the two guys that didn’t show up for their flight from Salta or didn’t pay their hotel bill in Salta matches the description of the two guys who rented the car that was in the fatal accident. They’ll notify the US State Department in B.A., who’ll pass the buck to Washington, DC and California. At some point their bosses in Los Angeles will learn that their men died in a car accident. Hopefully, everyone will assume it was just an accident and we won’t be involved.”
“That would be a nice resolution to our problem, wouldn’t it?” replied Suzanne.
“It’s not only a good solution to our problem, but it’s also justice for your father.”
“It’s
strange,” she thought out loud, “A few weeks ago all I wanted to do was to find out who murdered my father and get him arrested and in jail. I guess that was some form of revenge that didn’t require me to get my hands dirty or really do much of anything by myself. I really don’t feel at all badly about those two dead guys we left behind in Argentina.
“I don’t feel like I owe Dad any more now. The men who actually killed him have probably been punished. That part is like the empanadas we ate back in Argentina. You could only see the outside layer of the empanada when we started looking for why he was killed, but what was important was what was inside the empanada, why was he killed, and by whom. At this point I think I just want to get on with my professional life.”
“It’s interesting,” she continued, “that in some ways Dad’s plan to smuggle cocaine dissolved in wine was like an empanada. What’s on the outside hides what’s on the inside. I wonder if he actually got the idea one morning at the Casa de Empanadas.”
There was a long pause when neither of us said anything. “Speaking of the Casa de Empanadas, I had another good idea that morning that we haven’t talked about yet. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since then.”