by Moulton, CD
“The Indians said you built the clinic on San Cristobal with some Mathews person, but we thought it was only a little hut with a doctor every week or something,” Sarah wheedled. “We had no idea! We would have listened to you from the first if we’d known you have practical business experience!”
“I don’t have business experience,” Clint said. “Let’s get back to Robert. You can’t see him until Doc Okays it. Don’t make pests of yourselves. He couldn’t care less about your investments. He’s solely concerned with the patient.”
“Well, I suppose, if he’s getting proper care, we’ll just have to wait,” Grossman said.
“Mr. Faraday, I want you to know we didn’t know you were a person of quality or we would never have acted the way we did,” Sarah said. “I’m afraid we haven’t met many who we could relate to here and, just perhaps, we became too hard in our outlook. We were suspicious, you see. Everyone seemed to be trying to get money from us. They will steal anything not welded to the floor!”
So now Clint was a person of quality. He had money.
He took a deep breath and suggested they all calm down and stop over-reacting. They could wait until Doc said they could talk with Robert. There wasn’t really anything else to do.
A lot of, “Oh, well! Guess you’re right about that, old sock! Hearty good fortune and all that rot, eh what? Got to relax and go with the flow!” Clint could have puked. All of a sudden he was the greatest guy in the world and a true friend who was only trying to help!
They soon filed out. Clint got on the bike and rode around back until they got in taxis and left, then went back to Doc’s office.
“Do you believe those people? Can anyone be that totally devoid of character?” Doc asked. “I get them like that. Not usually so extreme.”
“Want to try to talk with Morris?”
“Can he?”
“He’s a lot better. I think he’ll be alright.”
They went to his room. He was looking a lot better.
“It was Clinton? Frank Clinton?” Robert asked when they came into the room.
“Close. Clint Faraday.”
“I’m still pretty confused about a lot of things.”
“Let it come naturally. Don’t try to force it,” Doc suggested. “I have to get back to work. If you get tired, tell Clint to take a hike.”
Robert grinned and waved. Clint pulled a chair close to the bed and asked what he remembered.
“I was doing something down by the dock and suddenly there were lights exploding and a lot of pain, then nothing except little flashes until I woke up here this morning. I seem to remember a boat and ... Pancho! Pancho was helping me and someone was trying to hit me again ... who I couldn’t see. There was someone in another boat. A blue one. One of those tour boat things.
“That’s about it.”
“Fatty?” Clint asked.
“Fatty? I don’t think ... he was in the other boat! He was trying to tell me something about money and ... that some people were going to ... try to do something.”
“Nothing else? No one else?”
“Some Indios. They were arguing with Sarah about making her go to the hospital or something on that order.”
“Pancho and some of the others were trying to get Sarah to let them bring you here. She refused. I had to go out there and take you out of the house and bring you here. Pancho came to me and said you were in bad shape and she wouldn’t let you get to treatment.”
“Pancho is a friend, I think. I don’t think my dear wife is. All she cares about is making money and impressing all her snotty friends. I begin to think she doesn’t give a shit if I live or die.”
“To tell the truth, that was my impression.”
“She’ll give you nothing but trouble.”
“Oh, she’s very impressed and it was all somebody else’s fault she acted like she did, but, you see, everyone was after her money and she didn’t have any idea of who she could trust! She just knows she can trust me!”
“What? You’re a multimillionaire recluse or something and she found out about it?”
“The Greenwoods, Auermonds and Fatty Grossman were here. Doc wouldn’t let them see you. All they could talk about was money – which we peons without a pot or window wouldn’t understand. Doc said I understood a little about money. I’d donated six million or so to the hospitals.”
“Did you?” he asked.
“Uh-huh. What he didn’t tell them was that I only arranged for the funds because of cases.”
“She didn’t piss in her pants when he said ‘six million’ did she?”
“She might have. She looked like she had.”
He laughed. “Spread it on thick! I think just maybe she’s the one who hit me. She’s worried that we can’t pay back the money the others put in the project. I want to be rid of her.”
“If you die the bills are all paid – but not if it’s murder. She has to arrange for you to die by what can be called natural causes.”
He looked very thoughtful, then suddenly was asleep. Clint left, went to the morgue and told Doc about the conversation, then headed home.
He Finally Saw the Light
“Clint? Sergio here. What happened with that Morris thing?” It was two days later. Morris was scheduled to get out of the hospital today. He was going to stay in an apartment he’d rented with Clint’s help. He didn’t care to go back to Popa. He could say the doctor ordered that he come to the hospital for checkups every day for five, then every other for six, then once a month if all was well.
“Nothing new. He saw the other partners for about fifteen minutes yesterday afternoon. Doc said they could stay ten minutes because it was business. If they came because they gave a damn about the patient they could have stayed a half hour. He had arranged that with Morris.”
“Those people... have no respect for anyone. They are not liked by the staff at Swan’s Cay. They’re demanding and nothing is ever what they wanted. You would think, at the price they were paying, they could get a little service now and then.
“I said to tell them they’re getting every service promised in the registration. If they wanted more they could arrange for it at their own expense. They seem to have enough money to pay for extra services.”
“They don’t have, as they said about me, a pot or window. It’s costing them more than they can afford to be here at all. It’s just a front. It’s all on charge cards.”
“Some German tourists were asking Elyn and Jorge how people could accumulate so much money and never learn how to act in public. Where they could overhear. They also managed to let them know they were German when they were at the next table having dinner with Marty Gold, the lawyer. That would send them a mixed message!”
“What does Marty think of them?”
“He’d like to slow-fry the lot.”
They talked a bit, then Sergio asked that Clint make a report about going out there to forcibly take Robert to the hospital. They had asked if he really was working with the national police. A report would make it official. “Just something like; went to Isla Popa and transported a crime victim, Robert Morris, to the hospital in Bocas del Toro, Isla Colón. Wife and son objected strongly. Needs investigation. That will scare the piss out of her!”
Clint agreed, sat down to write a short report, then went to the station and filed it. He then went around town talking to friends. He met Marty Gold at the Golden Grill, who said those people had tried to hire him to check on Clint and the police.
“Take the money. I filed a report about it.”
“Deal!” he said, grinning. “How about two hundred bucks per hour, one hour minimum.
“Oh, give them a break. Seeing they’re new here, only ninety bucks an hour.”
They laughed and he went on. After awhile he decided to go fishing for an hour or so to relax. When he got back he got a call from Sergio. He said Marty had gotten a copy of the report. He had put a stamp on it before making the copy and had put Clint down as being a “Sp
ecial consultant and deputy, Clint Faraday, Bocas del Toro” on the report identification line. They laughed about Marty letting them wheedle him down to seventy five dollars. It was the kind of thing lawyers did for twenty to twenty five dollars regularly.
Clint and Judi went to El Ultimo Refugio for dinner and to hear Dave and his friends perform some music. Judi met a friend she dated on a semi-regular basis and Clint met a woman from David, a friend of Dave’s, who spent the rest of the night with him.
He went to visit Robert the next morning to find him a lot better and in good spirits. He was going to tell Sarah and William they could go back to the states, but he was staying in Panamá until something could be worked out about the project. The Greenwoods and Auermonds were yelling about suing him for the loss and Grossman was trying to find a way to get his money back. He, at least, knew there was no way to sue anyone because of a bad investment.
“I still think it was Sarah who hit me, though it could as well have been William.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised at either or both,” Clint agreed. “Trouble is, we can’t get any proof, even as to who gave you the poison. They can claim there was antifreeze there and you must have gotten something that was contaminated by accident. Any path of investigation without more is a dead end. There’s simply not enough proof to present for a denunciado.”
He nodded. The way that whole bunch was fixated solely on money, it might have been a cooperative effort to get the insurance money. William had even said that it was a good thing Clint brought him to the doctor because there wouldn’t be any insurance if he’d died from a murder attempt.
“He had miscalculated that, too, hunh?” Clint asked.
“I would say! I can’t believe I let her turn my son into that ... thing. I hope I never see either of them again. That goes for the rest of them. I have enough income from royalties on ads I produced to keep me going pretty well here. There’s the house and dock. It’s comfortable.”
Clint agreed and went back home, then took his boat past Chiriqui Grande to visit friends on the comarca. He spent the night and headed back to Bocas Town. As soon as he was in range his phone buzzed. Judi. It seemed there had been an accident. Sarah and William had somehow turned off the main road to David and had run over the end of the short road there for heavy equipment used in repairs. They didn’t read Spanish so didn’t know it was marked as a private road and unauthorized access was prohibited. When the equipment wasn’t there the paved lot dropped directly into a little valley seventy meters below.
“Talk about a dead end!” she finished.
“I think it’s not quite that simple. Now I have to investigate what really happened.
“Are the Grossman crowd still there?”
“The Greenwoods. The rest went to Panamá City yesterday.”
Clint chatted a few minutes, then turned in at Chiriqui Grande and caught the David bus. He knew the road into the lot up in the mountains at Palo Seco. There was no way anyone wouldn’t know that was a service road.
“I’d like to know exactly what happened with the accident in Palo Seco. The gringos?” Clint asked at the checkpoint at La Mina/Hornitos.
“I went up there. Ask me, it was no accident. That kid – or somebody else – drove off the lot deliberately.”
“The kid was driving?”
“Strapped in behind the wheel. She wasn’t strapped in, but that would hardly matter. Air bags aren’t much good when you hit upside down after a drop of seventy meters.”
“I guess not! Thanks.”
“Want to know something else? I can tell you as a fellow cop.”
“What?”
“We’re looking into a few little things like the fact the transmission was in neutral, for one small example.”
“Anything to identify who did it?”
“We have a handprint, but couldn’t prove it had anything to do with that, even though there’s no other reason it would be over other prints on the transmission shift lever.”
“Whose?”
“We don’t know. We have one like it from an accident three years ago.”
“Pro. Somebody hired him.”
“I’d say.”
Clint went to look over the site, then back into David. It looked like the insurance would pay double if they died in an accident. The fact he could bring the “accident” part into serious question meant it wouldn’t pay at all. He might just do that!
He went to Dave’s apartment in David for the night. He knew the places to look for the kind of person who would make an “accident” happen like that. There was a little bar near the David fairgrounds that he’d been in before, then there were the places like two near Pedrigal. He got a couple of hints, but it wasn’t quite the type of thing they did. They usually would make it seem a mugging that got out of hand or a house fire that trapped someone inside. If the hit man was hired in Bocas it wouldn’t be known here except through those in the same business. He went back to David and sacked out, then caught the bus back to Chiriqui Grande at 7:00 in the morning, picked up his boat and was back home by two thirty. He went to talk with Sergio, nothing, and to Morris. Morris said he didn’t know anything except that they had taken a dive off a cliff in the rented car and William was supposed to be driving.
“He might have been, but he’s just seventeen and recently got his learner’s permit. He drove too fast and much too carelessly the two times I allowed him to drive with me in the car. It seems suspicious, but I don’t really care much. I think I was finally over her ever since I woke up in the hospital here. I haven’t gotten along with William since he was thirteen and she began to treat him like the undisputed king of the household. Most of the trouble I had with her was over him.
“I guess it’s a good part my fault. I was working ten hours a day and was dead tired at night. I let her take total control over him. She let him rule her.
“She spent so much on him, a part of which was bailing him out of trouble all the time, that I have the hidden account I can live on. If I sell the place I can pay everybody back. I’m not going to be in a hurry to sell, though. I do like the area and do like the people, now that I treat them like people and they treat me like a person. I can continue the ad business on the net. It won’t be as much, but it’ll pay the bills with a little for a good restaurant once in a while.
“I can’t believe I was becoming what I was becoming. That bunch came in here yesterday and never asked how I felt, even. All they wanted to do was get their money back or they’d sue and ruin me.
“I told them to go for it. The contract was for investment and the investment failed. I could tell them to stick it or they could wait until I sold the place to get a part of it back. I think Fatty’s the only one who understands it.”
“You know they didn’t go over that cliff, they were sent, don’t you?” Clint asked.
“Interesting way of putting it. I was right here. I didn’t do it.”
“Grossman and the Auermonds are gone. The Greenwoods are still here.”
“I don’t think Fatty would do anything like that. If it’s any of them it’s the Auermonds. They don’t have a line to cross whenever it comes to getting money. If the Greenwoods are here it was the Auermonds.”
“It was a hired job. It could be any of you.”
“I guess I have motive, but I swear I didn’t do it. I was right here and don’t have a clue when it comes to hired killers.”
“You all have motive. They die in an accident, Sarah anyhow, and the double indemnity pays off all the investment bills.”
“In that case I’ll keep the place and tell that bunch in Oklahoma to kiss my royal rusty ass!”
“It won’t pay. It was no accident and they don’t pay anything for murder.”
“Then I’m no better off than I was.”
They chatted awhile, then Clint went home to ask Judi if there was anymore news.
“The Greenwoods are going back to the states tomorrow. Nobody knows where Grossman is. The A
uermonds are in Panamá City. That’s about it. No other gossip around that’s anything we haven’t already covered.”
“I guess I’ll have to dig to find which of them did it. I’m not the type to let it pass. Not this. With those mafia types it’s better for the country that they go and kill each other off somewhere else. These people are just too disgustingly sordid for me to ever consider letting it go. The Auermonds and Greenwoods. Grossman – I’m on the fence about. He isn’t quite as low as the others.”
“That’s not saying a lot.”
He nodded. She grinned and shook her head. They changed the subject and discussed the way the seasons seemed to be changing in just a few years. Then Clint went home.
Find the Hit Man
How to trace this to one specific person was becoming a challenge. It was coming down to finding the hit man and breaking him down. Clint wanted to know who was behind it for reasons other than just catching someone who killed someone else – even if it could be shown they deserved worse.
Next step was finding the hit man. It was a dead end there if he couldn’t be found and identified. They would never know for certain which one was really behind it. Clint wanted to know more because Robert was staying in Panamá than for other reasons. If he was behind it there was no way Clint wouldn’t insist on prosecution. If it was one or more of the others he wanted them permanently barred from coming back to Panamá for any reason or at any time.
Funny how your ideas changed in another place with another culture. Clint looked on this kind of thing as a problem that should be handled by the place they came from, not in the place they pulled their shit. It involved gringos, not Panamanians – so why should Panamá have to pay for housing and feeding them? It was a more pragmatic outlook in a more pragmatic (in some ways) culture. The Indios were certainly pragmatic people to the point they seemed more fatalistic, at times.
Quit stalling. Find the assassin.
Clint had ways to find who would be behind this kind of thing in Bocas more than in David. He would start in Changuinola and work to Chiriqui Grande or even Mali, though his hired pro would be from Changuinola or Bocas.