‘Yes, sir, that’s right. An American. He may be a financier or a lawyer. And I believe he drives a racing green Jaguar sports car.’
Rodriguez frowned. ‘No one’s leaping to mind. But I work with a lot of American lawyers, Mr …?’
‘Williams. Derek Williams.’
They shook hands.
‘I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you come to my offices on Colonia del Valle tonight around six. I’ll have my secretary look into it for you in the meantime. Maybe between us we can come up with a name for you.’
‘Thank you, Mr Rodriguez,’ Williams said sincerely. After all the fruitless phone calls, the days and days of waiting, he had a result at last. ‘I’ll be there.’
At six o’clock on the nose, Williams presented himself at the reception desk on the ground floor of Luis Rodriguez’s offices on Colonia del Valle. He’d shaved, showered and changed into a pale linen suit for the meeting, and was looking his spruced best as he sauntered across the marble-floored lobby.
It was hard not to feel excited to be here.
This was it, at long last. This was the turning point in the case.
Of course, he had yet to prove that Charlotte Clancy’s lover had had a hand in her disappearance, and what Williams now felt quite certain was her death. But once he knew who the man was, he could start building a case against him. At a minimum he’d have something concrete to report to Charlotte’s poor parents, even if it wasn’t good news.
‘I’m here to see Luis Rodriguez.’ He handed the receptionist his card. ‘He’s expecting me.’
The girl smiled and picked up the telephone. After a brief conversation in Spanish she replaced the receiver and looked up at Williams.
‘Are you certain the meeting was today, Mr Williams?’ she asked politely. ‘It doesn’t seem to be in Mr Rodriguez’s calendar.’
Williams stiffened. Here we go again.
‘I’m quite certain. I spoke with him this morning and he asked me to come by at six. I—’
Before he could get any further, two armed policemen appeared at his side.
‘Derek Williams?’
‘Yes?’ Williams looked up, baffled. Not only because they seemed to have sprung up out of nowhere, but because they knew his name.
‘Mr Williams, you’re under arrest.’
Before Williams could say anything, the men unceremoniously grabbed an elbow each and physically lifted him off his feet, dragging him backwards towards the street door he’d come in by.
‘Under arrest? For what?’ Williams demanded, aware of the curious looks from everybody else in the lobby and strangely embarrassed by them. ‘This is a mistake!’
‘For visa violations,’ one of the cops answered, while his partner dug an elbow painfully and deliberately into Williams’ ribs. ‘We have orders to deport you immediately.’
‘Deport me? What?’ Williams erupted. ‘This is bullshit. I don’t need a visa. I’m a tourist on—’
A hard blow under the jaw stopped him mid-sentence. A second aimed directly at his nose broke the bone with an audible crunch. Blood poured from Williams’ face like an open faucet. The pain was excruciating, but it was the shock, the total surprise of what was happening, that slowed his reactions. Before he knew it, he was being bundled into the back of an unmarked car. And then the beating began in earnest.
He assumed he must have been conscious boarding the plane, but he had no memory of it, or of passing through Mexico City International. He did remember waking mid-flight with indescribable pain in his face and ribs, and a man in a white lab coat sitting next to him pulling out a syringe and plunging it into his leg. When he landed at LAX, however, the seat beside him was empty, so perhaps he’d imagined that part?
Lorraine’s anxious face, waiting to meet him, was the first ‘real’ thing he remembered.
‘I got a phone call from some rude asshole at the embassy in Mexico City telling me you’d be on this flight,’ she told him. ‘I almost didn’t come. I thought it was a prank call at first. Jesus Christ, Derek, what happened? What did they do to you?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Williams mumbled, a fat lip muffling his words. ‘One minute I’m waiting for a meeting with this businessman I told you about, and the next thing I know two lunatics are beating the crap out of me and I’m being deported.’
‘Well, you need to see a doctor,’ Lorraine insisted. ‘I’ll take you to the urgent care on Pico on our way home. And then we should go to the police. I mean, seriously, Derek, you’re an American citizen. You have rights.’
‘No.’ Williams interrupted her. ‘No police. And I don’t need a doctor either.’
‘Of course you need a doctor, are you nuts?’
‘NO!’ he said, more loudly than he meant to. ‘Sorry, honey. All I want is to go home and sleep and then I need to call the Clancys. See if you can get them in for a meeting first thing tomorrow.’
Williams’ head was exploding with pain even before Todd Clancy started yelling.
‘How dare you!’ Charlie’s father shook his fist threateningly in Williams’ general direction, like an angry cartoon character. ‘We sent you out to Mexico to find out what happened to our daughter. Not to have you come back here and slander her, drag her name through the mud. You repeat these allegations and I swear to God I’ll sue you for every miserable cent you own!’
‘They’re not “allegations”, Mr Clancy,’ Williams said, keeping his cool in the face of this unexpected onslaught. ‘Think about it. I have no reason to make any of this up, do I? I’m talking to you both privately, as my clients.’
‘Ex clients,’ growled Tucker Clancy.
‘Sir, all I’m interested in is getting justice for your daughter,’ Williams protested. ‘And I believe we just got a whole lot closer. What happened to me proves it. We’re rattling some pretty powerful cages over there.’
‘We’re not “closer” to anything,’ Tucker Clancy snarled, his white button-down shirt looking tighter and more uncomfortable than ever.
‘Were you aware that Missing had been investigating Charlotte’s disappearance long before they contacted you?’ Williams asked, abruptly changing tack.
‘What do you mean?’ Tucker’s eyes narrowed.
‘Frederique Zidane, Charlotte’s friend, had already been visited, by Mrs Baden personally, months before I showed up. Do you have any idea why Mrs Baden might have kept that from you?’
Mary Clancy and her husband exchanged troubled glances.
‘No,’ said Tucker, still visibly angry. ‘All I know is, whatever this French girl told you, or Valentina Baden, or anybody else, it’s a lie. My daughter would never have an affair with a married man. Never! Charlie wasn’t even … she was eighteen, for God’s sake. She was still a virgin.’
‘Oh, Tucker!’ His wife rubbed her eyes wearily. ‘Come on, honey.’
‘Come on what?’ If possible, Tucker Clancy sounded more outraged.
‘She wasn’t a virgin,’ Mary Clancy insisted calmly. ‘She’d been dating that Todd for at least a year.’
‘Dating, yes. But that doesn’t mean …’
Tucker Clancy’s wife gave him a pitying look. ‘It doesn’t do any good yelling about it, honey,’ Mary persisted. ‘If Mr Williams has found a suspect, or even a motive for someone to want to hurt Charlie, that’s progress. Especially if Missing have been keeping things from us – although I can’t imagine why they would have.’
‘Like hell it’s progress!’ Tucker Clancy roared, banging his fist on the table and getting to his feet. ‘It’s bullshit is what it is. You’re fired,’ he told Williams. ‘And I expect a full rebate for the additional week we paid you for, seeing as you managed to get yourself booted out of the goddamn country. Come on, Mary.’
With an apologetic look, his wife followed him out of Williams’ office.
A few minutes later, Williams’ own wife came in.
Thank God I got married, Williams thought, admiring Lorraine’s curvaceous bosom under her tight lemon
yellow sweater, the baby-bulge beginning to show in the pencil skirt that clung to her ass like saran wrap over a pair of peaches. It made it easier to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – in this case getting fired for doing exactly what you’d been hired to do – when you knew somebody had your back. Life was better as a team. Maybe later he’d take that trip to the doctor after all. And afterwards Lorraine could tend to his bruises and tell him how much she loved him and comfort him the way that only a woman could …
‘What the hell, Derek?’ Her waspish tone put an end to his fantasy like a pin in a balloon. ‘They fired you! We needed that money. Do you know how many paying clients I turned away so you could run off to Mexico for those bozos? And now you’re out?’
She made it sound like it was his fault.
‘I did a damn good job in Mexico,’ he shot back angrily. ‘A little support might be nice, Lorraine, especially after this.’ He pointed to his swollen face, the black eye and distended cheek making him look like a boxer who’d lost a title fight.
But Lorraine was unrelenting.
‘It was bad business. I told you that from the moment they walked in the door.’
‘Oh yeah? Well, that’s too bad. Because it ain’t over,’ said Williams, finally losing his temper. ‘I’m gonna find out what happened to Charlotte Clancy if it’s the last thing I do. Whoever’s protecting this lover of hers, this American, thinks they’ve won. But they’ve got another think coming. And so has Mrs Baden, if she thinks she can keep hiding from me.’
‘Is that a fact? Well, so have you, Derek Williams, if you think I’m going to stay married to a man who refuses to provide for his family and insists on throwing good money after bad. You think about that while you’re off on your wild goose chase.’
And with that she stormed off, slamming the door behind her.
Six beers later, the barmaid at Luca’s was a lot more understanding.
‘I think it’s great that you care about finding this girl, sweetie. I totally get it.’
‘I mean someone should care, right?’ Williams slurred, his eyes mesmerized by the steady rise and fall of the barmaid’s breasts. ‘Her ol’ man’s living in cloud cuckoo land. Doesssn’t wanna hear the truth.’
‘I hear ya,’ the girl said, refilling his glass.
‘And my wife … my so-called wife … ish all about money. All about the Benjamins.’
‘That’s too bad.’
Williams gazed morosely into his glass. He was at the stage of drunkenness where time lost all meaning, and the minutes and hours flew by, indistinguishable from one another. He wasn’t sure when, exactly, the red-headed man had sat down beside him or when he’d started talking. But at some point the guy was grabbing him painfully by the shoulders and squaring up to him like he was gonna hit him or something.
‘Now you listen to me, you fat moron,’ the man told Williams. ‘Back off the Clancy case or you’ll regret it.’
Belatedly, Williams shrugged him off, raising his own fists in a rather disoriented show of defiance.
‘I’ll regret it, will I? Says who?’ He jabbed the man in the chest with an angry finger.
‘Says the professionals.’ The redhead pulled out his badge and flashed his gun.
‘You call the FBI professional?’ Williams scoffed. ‘Don’t make me laugh.’
‘I mean it, Williams, you’re an amateur and you’re way out of your depth. You don’t know what you’re doing.’
‘I know what you’re doing, though,’ Williams retorted, his beer-addled brain trying to work out how this douchebag knew his name, or where to find him. ‘Nothing! You guys never even tried to find Charlotte.’
‘That’s because Charlotte was a cheap whore who more than likely got popped by some small-time drug dealer out there.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ mumbled Williams.
‘Actually, I do,’ the man said. ‘You need to drop this. And while you’re at it, you need to stop harassing the Badens. And Luis Rodriguez.’
‘Harassing? I didn’t harass anyone!’
‘Rodriguez is a good man, a great man actually, and a friend to this country.’
‘I never said he wasn’t.’
‘You’re not fit to shine the man’s shoes.’
‘Ah, go screw yourself.’ Williams waved an arm dismissively. He was done arguing with this idiot, and too hammered to try to figure out his cryptic insults.
The man stood up and left a twenty on the bar.
‘Consider this a friendly warning,’ he told Williams. ‘The next one won’t be so polite.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Present day …
‘Aaaaagh! Luis. Ay, yes! Yes!’
Luis Rodriguez closed his eyes and tried to tune out the girl’s exaggerated moans of pleasure. Why did women do this? Did they think he was too stupid to realize they were faking it? Or that he cared, in any way, about their pleasure?
With his wife – his ex-wife – it had been different. With her it had been making love. Something real. But these twenty-something model/actress/whores that flocked to his bed since his wife left him, hoping for crumbs from his vast fortune? They were there solely for Rodriguez’s own pleasure. He couldn’t care less whether they lived or died.
‘Grrrrrrr-aaaagh!’ he grunted, climaxing at last inside the writhing beauty beneath him. Annabella. Or was it Isabella? Something like that. They were in his office on Colonia del Valle after a lunch date that had spilled into the early afternoon. The girl had gotten a Tiffany gold bracelet out of it, and Rodriguez had enjoyed an excellent meal, accompanied by the envious stares of his fellow diners, followed by twenty minutes of decently satisfying sex with the girl showing off her yoga moves as he bent her backwards, then forwards, over his couch.
‘Oh my God! That was incredible, baby.’ She was still gushing as she stepped back into her panties and dress. But he was already back in work mode, sitting at his desk and flipping open his laptop. He had a big deal to close this afternoon with Willie Baden, owner of the LA Rams, and an important new contact to meet before he boarded his private plane to Los Angeles tonight.
The Baden deal had ended up being more complicated than he’d anticipated. Luis had been introduced to Willie through his wife, Valentina, who grew up in Mexico City and who often attended the same charity functions that he did. As two committed philanthropists with a common tragedy in their pasts – Valentina’s younger sister had ‘disappeared’ in her teens, never to be seen again, at the exact same age that Luis’s beloved sister, Carlotta, had lost her life to drugs – Luis and Valentina had instantly understood one another. As a result, he’d expected business with Willie to be plain sailing. Unfortunately, the man’s greed had made negotiations difficult. Willie was attempting to play hardball. But when push came to shove, no one’s balls were harder than Luis Rodriguez’s. He could be generous and compassionate, qualities that had won him an adoring fan base amongst the city’s poor. But he remained a street-fighter at heart.
Nonetheless, he was anxious about the trip. The streets of LA were Willie Baden’s streets, not his, and the rules of warfare were different there.
His nerves were one of the reasons, probably the main one, that Luis had needed sex this afternoon. Isabella’s attentions had been a distraction and a release.
He tried to analyze his fears, as he tried to analyze everything. The Baden deal was a part of it, for sure. A bigger part was the fact that this would be the first time in some years that he had set foot on US soil, an event that always raised his stress levels, but that felt even more unpleasant than usual now, amid the new political climate in Washington. This wasn’t a good time to be an extremely rich Mexican national, known to the FBI, however decent and honorable your intentions might be. It didn’t matter to the American Government that you’d donated millions of dollars to drug rehabilitation charities and other worthy civic causes. It didn’t matter that you were part of the solution in Mexico. Once you were a mark
ed man, that was it. They hated you.
Bastards! What was it about Americans that made them so envious of success in others, no matter how hard those others might have worked to earn it? Luis Rodriguez was a businessman, pure and simple. The way he saw it, his only ‘crime’ had been to succeed. Half of Mexico City already belonged to him and the other half would one day, yet he had come up from nothing, from less than nothing. Dirt poverty of a kind that most ordinary Americans couldn’t even imagine.
‘You look stressed, baby. Let me help.’ The girl had crept up behind him and was attempting to massage his bull-like shoulders with her long, bony fingers. She smelled of some heavy, musky perfume and sex. Like a fish dipped in patchouli. Luis felt revulsion, his earlier desire utterly spent and his excellent lobster linguini churning violently in his gut.
‘You have to go now. I need to work.’
‘Really?’ she pouted. But the look on his face answered her question succinctly and she took the hint. ‘OK, baby. Well, you’ve got my number. See you soon.’
Luis didn’t even look up as she sashayed out in ridiculously high wedge heels, her narrow hips swinging along with her waist-length hair. Stupid whore. He longed for his wife like a child longing for its mother. Everything was worse since she left him.
As soon as the girl had gone, Marisol, his secretary, stuck her loyal, unattractive head around the door. ‘The Colombian delegation has arrived, Mr Rodriguez. Should I show them up or do you need a few minutes?’
Luis smiled. He loved Marisol for her tact and discretion. He paid her well, but at the same time he knew that her loyalty ran deeper than money.
‘Have them wait in the blue room. Offer them some coffee and tell them I’ll join them shortly.’
Luis looked at his watch. In four hours he’d be at the airport. In seven, he’d be in Los Angeles. In the belly of the beast. Now that the day was actually here, it was hard to believe somehow.
Los Angeles, for Luis Rodriguez, meant danger. It meant risk. But it also meant rewards, or at least the opportunity for rewards, of both a business and a personal nature. It’s worth it, he told himself. It’s time to go. To stake your claim and take what’s yours.
Sidney Sheldon's the Silent Widow Page 19