Five Quickies For Roger And Suzanne (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 7)

by Jerold Last

  “Call your boss, Linda Poras, and tell her you decided to go directly to the UCLA library this morning so you didn’t have to fight traffic both ways to and from the airport to Westwood. You’ll come in after you’ve researched the whole antibody thing. You can do that from the composition, even if you don’t know the sequence, can’t you?”

  “You do remember that Linda is a redhead, don’t you?”

  “Yeah”

  “No, I can’t do that from the composition. I’d have to know the sequence.”

  “Is there any chance she’d think you’re dumb enough not to know that?”

  “There’s a pretty good chance that she’s dumb enough not to think of that, despite the doctoral degree.”

  “OK, then. Call her and stall her at least till after lunch while we figure out how to play this. Last night Suzanne and I tried to put this all together. Both of us think we have a conspiracy to steal Eugenio's patents here, with some or all of the leadership team at Plantacur involved. So how do we separate the ones in on the killing from the others?”

  "It looks like a slam dunk that Linda's one of the guilty ones"

  "I think we can add Jim Schantz to the probably guilty list. He denied knowing who Eugenio was, or ever having met him, but still knew he was from Santa Cruz de Bolivia."

  "Do you think we could beat the truth out of either of them?"

  "Probably, but that kind of confession wouldn't hold up in court. We need to trap them into naming names while confessing something admissible in a trial. The question is how we can set one or both of them up to do what we want before they succeed in killing you. What do you think tipped them off that you were a plant?"

  "Did anyone hack into their computer last night? They may have thought one new employee and one security leak added up to two and set the mugging up to get me out of there."

  "Sounds reasonable to me, and yes, someone did. They found that Plantacur's new drug is a toxic carcinogen at about the same time that their venture capital source dried up and told them they were on their own."

  Vincent let out a long, slow whistle. "Claro. That would explain why they don't like me anymore, and why they might take some risks to get a new drug they could substitute for the old one when nobody was looking."

  "Let's see what happens if you stir the pot a little bit. Call Linda with the UCLA library story and invite her to lunch with you some place in Westwood where you two can have some 'privacy'. I'll bet you she makes the date with you."

  So Vincent made the phone call and ended up with a hot date for lunch. "Here's what I want you to tell her at lunch, just this way," I explained to him. "Now it's time to stir that pot a little more."

  I called Bruce. "Hey, I bet you'd like an afternoon off? We're stirring the pot to see if we can cook up a stew. Why don't you call Jim Schantz and tell him how you can't get him out of your mind and you have an afternoon of vacation time today. Invite him to lunch some place he likes near his apartment. I suspect he'll say yes. If he does, here's what I want you to tell him at lunch, just this way."

  My next phone call was to Detective Brown of the LAPD. "I think we may have your murder case solved, but I'm going to need your help with a bunch of arrests. Can I count on you to drop everything and join us when I call you this afternoon if things go as planned?"

  My last call was to Suzanne. "I'm sorry for the short notice but you'll have to stay home with Robert this afternoon. Things are coming to a boil at Plantacur and I need Bruce to try to seduce one of the killers over lunch and get him into some incriminating pillow talk. Can you handle it?"

  So that's how Vincent ended up at a restaurant in Westwood a few blocks from the UCLA parking structure where all of this began, wining and dining his boss Linda Poras. Just a block or two further into Westwood Bruce would be wining and dining her boss Jim Schantz in about half an hour. I was strategically between them as the reserve force if anything that seemed dangerous or threatening happened during their romantic lunch dates.

  Each of them had a throwaway cell phone preset to call me at the push of a button, with instructions to throw the phone with its SIM chip removed into the nearest dumpster after lunch if it turned out not to be needed. I had a quiet place to sit and a tape recorder attached to my cell phone by a high gain microphone to record any interesting conversation that might happen at either lunch. We were all set.

  Vincent had memorized his script. He started the prepared dialogue over drinks after they ordered their food while they waited for lunch to be served.

  "I'm sorry, Linda, but I lied to you on the telephone when I spoke to you. I did come in to work this morning. I had just parked my car when two muggers jumped me. They had no way of knowing it, but I've had military training to handle situations like that. I beat them up pretty badly and got the heck out of there.

  "The other time I lied to you was when I took the job at Plantacur. I said I met my wife in the States and we went to Chile afterwards. It was really the other way around. I was sent to Chile as a sort of military advisor during the cold war, and met my wife there.

  "Anyway, I was thinking that you might need someone with my particular skills as a friend, and I could use some extra cash and some fringe benefits, if you get my meaning."

  "Wow, that's a big adjustment you're asking me to make just out of the blue. Let me think about it for a minute or two."

  The timing was good as the waiter came over just then and served us our meals.

  Plates were placed on the table, water glasses were refilled, fresh drinks were refused, and the wait staff finally left us alone. Linda looked up at me. I pushed the button on my cell phone, which now lay out of sight beside me on the railing along the wall beneath the table.

  "Did you hack into the computer network at work last night using my user ID and password?"

  "I don't know. If I said yes I'd be admitting to a crime. Why are you asking me?"

  "To be honest, I'm trying to figure out how much you know."

  "I know a lot. I've guessed a whole lot more. And there's one more thing I should tell you. I met Eugenio Vasquez at a scientific meeting in Lima last year. We spent a whole day together visiting museums and drinking beer. I kind of liked him."

  Linda's whole demeanor changed. She stared at Vincent hard enough to see through him for a full minute. Then she slumped down in her chair.

  "What do you want from me?"

  "I already told you, money and fringe benefits. In return you get protection and access to my rather specialized expertise. But you'll have to be straight with me the same way I'm laying my cards on the table with you."

  "I don't have a whole lot of choice, do I?"

  "Sure you do. But the smart way to play it is to get me on your side."

  "OK. The Schantz brothers hatched out a scheme to steal some patents and switch drugs to keep Plantacur afloat until we could sell the company and get our money. They recruited Helena Fletcher, John Hardy, and me later on to cover up the bad toxicology data and the financing issues. It seemed so simple---but then the entire scheme started to unravel. Eugenio Vasquez was actually coming here to LA to make a deal for his patents and Plantacur didn't have any money to deal with." Her story came to an abrupt halt.

  "What happened then?"

  "I don't know. But Vasquez was murdered a quarter of a mile away from here and it almost had to be about those patents. I don't know who killed him."

  "How about those muggers who attacked me this morning? What do you know about them?"

  "Technically, I hired them. But I was just carrying the money. Robert Schantz gave me a $1,000 bonus in cash to set that up, and I needed the extra cash real badly. But I promise you, they were just supposed to scare you, not do any real damage. I'm in trouble, aren't I?"

  "Some, I don't know how much. But being honest now can get you leniency later."

  "I need somebody to look after my interests in this mess, and it sure isn't going to be the Schantz brothers. How much money will it actually take for yo
u to volunteer to be my hero?"

  "That's hard to say. That $1,000 bonus you got for setting me up would be a good start. Let's see what happens next. I'm not planning on returning to work today. But you can assume I'll be on your side if you'll help me prove what's going on at Plantacur. I sense that there will be a meeting of the inner circle this afternoon, and you might try to get invited. I'm going to give you a little toy to take with you to the meeting, a voice-activated digital transmitter that you can turn on with this tiny switch here. I'll be somewhere nearby listening. If you can get somebody to say who killed Eugenio and why, I think I can promise you that you'll come out of this as the heroine rather than one of the villains."

  At just about that time Bruce connected with Jim Schantz and they sat down for lunch at a table less than a quarter of a mile away. Bruce had also memorized his script, and started right after lunch had been served.

  "Jim, there's some stuff you need to know. First, you didn't pick me up last night. I set things up so you'd meet me 'by chance' at the bar. Second, you're the prime suspect in Eugenio Vasquez's murder, and will probably be arrested for it tomorrow if we don't find someone else who looks better for the killer between now and then. Third, I'm a detective working on this case. Finally, we know all about what's going on at Plantacur, and all of the top scientists are looking at spending some time in jail unless they change sides and help us get the evidence we need to prosecute the top executives for fraud, and maybe worse."

  Schantz went pale and gulped some water.

  "I don't know what you're talking about and don't have to listen to this crap!"

  He stalked out of the restaurant without looking back.

  Bruce, Vincent, Detective Brown, and I were sitting in my car a couple of blocks east of Plantacur, well within the range of Linda's transmitter, hoping she'd turn it on and that we'd hear something incriminating. Suddenly, there was the noise of chairs being moved and people talking coming through the receiver, which was also a recorder.

  Somebody started organizing things. "I called this meeting because we've got problems and need to figure out the best way to deal with them. Jim, tell the others what you told me."

  "Thanks Robert." So the first voice was Robert Schantz and voice number two was his brother Jim. "Somebody I thought I had met casually turned out to be not so casual at all, and also turned out to be a detective. His name is Bruce, and he pretty much accused me of murder and talked about fraud here at the company."

  "Whose murder?" That was Linda's voice. Good for her. She was doing exactly what Vincent had asked her to, trying to get someone to say something incriminating.

  "The Bolivian scientist with the drug patents, Eugenio Vasquez."

  I glanced back at Detective Brown. Literally and figuratively, his ears and his interest level had perked up at the mention of his case.

  Robert's voice came on again. "Linda, what about your hotshot new biochemist Vincent? Has he been officially discouraged from any more peeking into our computer files? And do you think he has anything to do with this Bruce character?"

  "I gave the money to the men just like you instructed me, Robert. I have no idea what happened after that. And I have no idea who Bruce is."

  "Helena, John, Emil, do you know anything about either Bruce or Vincent and who they're working for?"

  It was nice of Robert to let us know who else was there at the meeting. Now we knew who was in on the conspiracy. All we still needed was a spontaneous confession to the murder.

  John or Emil said, "I never met either of them." Two more voices, one male and one female, said, "Neither did I."

  I turned to Detective Brown. "Is this recording enough to get a judge to sign warrants to search all of their apartments for a .32 caliber pistol or other evidence related to the Vasquez murder?"

  "Probably. I'll get started on the affidavit here on my laptop computer while we listen to the rest of this. I can e-mail it to the judge and send my partner over to pick it up. We should have all of the warrants in about an hour or two. You did a great job setting this up, Roger. Thank you."

  We went back into listening mode while Brown typed his affidavit. Linda Poras was still trying to get Robert Schantz or one of the others to incriminate themselves. She had obviously taken Vincent's advice to heart and was trying to establish her credentials as a heroine.

  "Did any of you ever meet Eugenio Vasquez?" she asked the conspirators.

  "I spoke to him on the phone a couple of times, but I never met him in person." That was Jim Schantz's voice. "I spoke to him once when he was still in Bolivia. He called me from his university in Santa Cruz. All I remember from that phone call is that he spoke English with an Australian accent. He called me again from LAX when he arrived at the airport in Los Angeles, the day he was killed. It was clearly the same man on the phone. You couldn't miss the Aussie accent. He had some ideas about selling us the licensing rights on his patents. I told him I'd call him at his hotel the next morning and we'd get together with the folks in the firm who made the decisions the next day.

  "I told all of this to Robert and John Hardy as soon as I hung up. Helena Fletcher joined us in the middle of the discussion. He was killed later that night, so nothing else happened that I know anything about."

  "How about you three? Did anyone follow up on the phone call?" Linda asked Robert, Hardy, and Fletcher.

  Helena Fletcher was the first to answer. "I knew our cash flow was a little less than zero, so it was clearly going to be a problem. That's what I told Robert and John. Then I went home."

  Next up was John Hardy. "My advice to Robert was that it would be Vasquez's word against ours if we just went ahead with one or more of his patented drugs. By the time a patent infringement lawsuit brought by a Bolivian national made it through our court system, we'd all be rich and our grandchildren would be the defendants. It made more sense to bluff it out with a hick from Bolivia who spoke English with an Australian accent then to try to pay him off with money we didn't have."

  Finally it was Robert's turn. "I never spoke to Vasquez myself. I tried to reach some of the money people who funded Plantacur to sound them out on getting ten or twenty thousand dollars to offer Vasquez, along with some percentage royalty on sales and a couple of cases of Foster's Lager beer if he signed the patents over to us without any fuss. I couldn't reach anyone that late in the day so was going to call them again first thing the next morning. By then Vasquez was dead and the whole issue was moot. We were just going to go ahead with one or two of his drugs and nobody would ever have known what we did."

  "What about you, Emil?" Linda asked Emil Proctor.

  "This is the first time I've heard any of this. There's no way I'd have gotten involved in this kind of fraudulent infringement of somebody's legally awarded patents if I had known what was going on."

  The meeting got back on topic of what to do about Bruce and Vincent. The leadership team talked it to death for the next hour or two, but nobody made any reasonable suggestions and no decisions were made. Clearly, they were all frightened of what the repercussions were going to be when all of this corporate malfeasance came out.

  In the meantime, I handed Detective Brown a folded piece of paper. "No peeking allowed. When you finally execute those warrants, here's whose apartment in which I believe you'll find the .32 that was used for the killing. And here are the names of the criminals I want you to arrest for the murder and for conspiracy to commit murder. I'll tell you how I figured it out then if I turn out to be correct. And I will turn out to be correct."

  "I've heard that you like to play Sherlock Holmes. I'll bet you $5 that you're wrong."

  "It's a bet. How about we all go visit the big meeting at Plantacur now? I doubt they'll ever make any decisions without our help."

  Vincent still had his key cards and was still nominally an employee there so we could just walk in, completely legally, at his invitation. Detective Brown led us into the conference room. I was right behind him, followed by Vincent and Bruce.
Our arrival created quite a stir.

  "You can't just walk in here like this. You're trespassing. If you don't leave immediately, I'm calling the police," the Plantacur COO and lawyer John Hardy sputtered indignantly, brandishing his cell phone like a weapon.

  Brown flashed his badge and calmly sat down at the conference table. "We're already here. Everyone sit down and relax, we're all going to be here a while.

  "In the meantime I'd like to introduce three detectives, Roger, Bruce, and Vincent. I think all of you have met one or the other of them already."

  After a lot of confusion things sorted out and we all sat at the table.

  Hardy blustered some more using his weapon of choice, words. "You can't make any of us stay here against our wills. I, for one, am leaving. Right now."

  "Vincent, if anyone gets within six feet of that door I want you to forcibly detain them and put them under arrest for fraud, conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to incite assault, and accessory after the fact to murder. Now we're all going to sit here and discuss patent infringement and murder while we wait for the results of several searches done completely legally, with warrants, to be completed. After that, we'll figure out who is going home tonight and who is going to be a guest of the City of Los Angeles' penal system for the foreseeable future."